NBC's Extra, the tabloid TV news program, Friday night, April 24. A young woman sits looking forlorn and distraught on a curb in front of a suburban home. She is locked out of her house, she says, and calls a locksmith to save her. Minutes later, the truck pulls up, the locksmith opens the door, and our friend is saved. Right? Wrong! The locksmith has been caught by the NBC investigative team! It wasn't her house! Beware: we are all in danger from careless locksmiths who will let strangers into our homes.

Later that night, on the eleven o'clock news, another NBC News "undercover" investigative team cons hotel desk clerks into giving them room keys with the old "I left my key in the room" ploy.

The theme of both reports: You're never safe — but thanks to NBC investigative reporters you will be more careful.

In fact, these reporters have not really "investigated" anything; they have set up and embarrassed otherwise decent people into making careless mistakes‚ for our entertainment.

Raising Hell: Straight Talk with Investigative Journalists

One of the several virtues of Custodians of Conscience, a study of theory and practice, and Raising Hell, a collection of interviews, is that they rescue the high calling of investigative journalism from its practitioners on TV news. Investigative journalists are truly the high priests of the reporting craft, the custodians of the public conscience. They call attention to breakdowns in the social system, stir up our sense of outrage, and move public officials to reform.

However, because Ettema and Glasser are not working journalists but professors nursed on the jargon of communications departments and skilled in applying the theories of philosophers, historians, and social scientists to the cultural raw material of newspaper stories and TV clips, the several voices in their study — some beat reporters and some pure academics — often speak different languages.

What journalists call "pieces," for example, the authors call "texts." Shoe-leather reporters say they get the facts out, make the case, and let the public decide. The authors say that investigative reporters are really making a series of complex moral decisions: they frame the material to present victims and villains, use irony to imply critical judgments, carefully distinguish between merely reporting facts (such as conveying what a government official has stated at a press conference), and examining an issue to the point where the reporter achieves moral certainty about the story and stakes his or her integrity on it being true.

The real meat of the book is the interviews, conducted over ten years, with some of the best investigators, usually winners of the Pulitzer Prize or an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. For example: Don Barlett and Jim Steele of The Philadelphia Inquirer, in "The Great Tax Giveaway," demonstrated that the 1986 "tax reform" bill was also a boon to 650 rich and powerful individuals and corporations for whom exemptions were written into the code. Loretta Tofani, in a three-part series for The Washington Post in 1982, documented, in hair-raising interviews, twenty-four male rapes in the Prince George County Detention Center. Don Shelby of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis showed that law enforcement officers failed to pursue sexual abuse allegations against prominent citizens, including a judge.

The authors present Barlett and Steele's research, which combines in-depth study of documents and interviews, as a case of "situational irony" — the "reformers" of the tax code offered a promise of justice that actually "yielded further injustice." To achieve "moral certainty," Tofani also interviewed the jail's nurses who treated the rape victims and the rapists themselves to verify the victims' stories. Then she concentrated her account on those victims who were in jail for minor offenses, lest readers imagine the rapes were somehow fair punishment for their crimes. Shelby, to be "morally certain" the teenage boy who accused the judge of sexual abuse could be trusted, meticulously questioned the boy about the layout and decor of the judge's home where the acts allegedly took place, then, to prove the boy had been at the scene, put the accuser in a car and told him to drive him to the judge's home.

Alongside the slow-moving Custodians of Conscience, Raising Hell is almost refreshingly lite. Three junior faculty members at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, collaborated to interview twelve investigative journalists. Their mixed-dozen includes, among others, Gerald Posner, Douglas Frantz, Sydney Schanberg, Tim Wiener, and David Burnham.

The editors offer no explanation of their method, don't say who interviewed whom, or why they chose these twelve (none of whom appear in the Ettema-Glasser volume), and misspell some prominent journalists' names. Nevertheless, they have produced an odd, delightful, and occasionally inspiring book. (Unfortunately, no one told them there is already a 1983 book on investigative journalism by David Weir and Dan Noyes with the same title.)

The teacher-editors seem to be using their subjects as fellow instructors, posing questions about their backgrounds, motivations, writing rules, and moral codes that are intended to prove and elicit character. Most of the twelve urge stubbornness, healthy skepticism, and discipline — the willingness to sit on a hard chair at a desk and pore over thousands of documents — for the final ecstasy of coming onto that one fact that's a revelation. "That," says Douglas Frantz, now with The New York Times, "is what I live for." Among their role models are H.L. Mencken, Sy Hersh, A.J. Liebling, Upton Sinclair, and Barlett and Steele.

Sydney Schanberg's chapter, for me, is the most moving. He says he was drawn to the third world, to Cambodia, where he risked his life to get out the story of the Vietnam-era bombing that was the basis for The Killing Fields, because in the first world "more people are capable of looking after themselves."

As a New York Times op-ed columnist, he says, he risked not his life but risked — and lost — his job for criticizing big Manhattan real estate developers and a proposed highway project, thus bringing his writings into conflict with the Times's editorial page. As a columnist for New York Newsday until it closed, Schanberg continued the same crusades. For him, the best journalist is the "outsider," the "explorer." His journalism is for him an "avenue of protest along with teaching."

Both books remind us how much journalism, as a way of life, more than any profession outside teaching and the religious life, demands depth of character — qualities of compassion, truth telling, and fearlessness.

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