In his new book, Taking On The Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, longtime investigative journalist Steve Weinberg profiles Tarbell, one of the OGs of the genre, and examines her famous takedown of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The University of Missouri J-school professor, who writes for Columbia Journalism Review and is the author of eight books, says he’s been “typecast as an investigative journalist for almost [his] entire career.” We caught up with him to talk about how the Internet’s changed the investigative journalism world, the best and the brightest of today’s reporters, and who’s going to pull a Tarbell on Microsoft, Starbucks and the rest of America’s giant corporations.
How did the idea for the book come about?
I’ve been typecast as an investigative journalist almost my entire career, even when I was in journalism school. As a result of that, my path has led to running this group called “Investigative Reporters and Editors.” It has about 5,000 members and it’s all over the world. It’s physically based at the University of Missouri [where Weinberg works as a professor].
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Because of that job I was helping investigative journalists every day and I was a spokesperson for investigative journalism, and I started thinking more about the craft. I finally got around to reading Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company, which had come out in 1904 and which I’d heard about in my American history courses but I had never bothered to read. It had been long out of print, in the days when being out of print actually meant out of print.
I read it, all 800 pages and I thought, “Wow, this is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I’ve ever read.” It was 100 years old at the time I read it, but it could have been written yesterday about Microsoft or McDonalds or Starbucks. It was about a dominant corporation taking over the world, and she also brought down John. D. Rockefeller. I just felt like I needed to know more about the person who did this, so I proposed a biography about her.
How do you keep the subject fresh?
Part of it was looking into her techniques and getting into what she did in terms of investigative reporting. But also, her life, in a way, is outdated, but it’s also fresh for the contemporary reader because she was, obviously, a she, and struggled against huge odds to get anywhere other than being a stay-at-home mom, which she definitely knew she didn’t want to do, or a schoolteacher. Those were pretty much the options. She managed to go to college and get a degree, which wasn’t unheard of, but she was the first woman to graduate from Alleghany College. Through a series of unplanned events, she broke into journalism in a serious way. Up until her, there wasn’t a woman who was taken seriously as a journalist.
Most important of all, I would say, is coming up against a gigantic, dominant institution run by someone who is every bit as powerful as Bill Gates and a hell of a lot more colorful. I felt like it had a lot of resonance for today.
Where’s the next Ida Tarbell going to come from?
There are a lot of them now. You hear a lot about the death or illness of investigative reporting, and of course, at some newspapers and at some magazines and some broadcast stations and some Web sites, that’s true, it’s sicker than it use to be. But I would say in general, investigative reporting is extremely healthy at this country and in other countries, and a lot of the people doing the great work are female. It’s not so much being a pioneer anymore.
| I don’t think anyone has done Microsoft or Starbucks or McDonalds or you can fill in the blank as well as Tarbell did standard oil. |
I don’t think the key issue is where is the next one going to come from. I think the bigger issue is, how many journalists are going to do a great job explaining the big institutions that are dominant in our time. There are a few journalists who do that on a regular basis but not a lot. The investigative reporting — I’m generalizing of course — tends to ignore the corporate sector and look more at government.
There’s Jim Steele and Don Barlett, who now write for Vanity Fair but really made their name at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Diana Henriques at The New York Times is mighty good at corporate gigantism and its behavior. There are a few others, but I don’t think anyone has done Microsoft or Starbucks or McDonalds or you can fill in the blank as well as Tarbell did standard oil, although there were some pretty good books on Microsoft in the past few years.
What are your thoughts on ProPublica?
I don’t know a lot — obviously, I know what you’re talking about and I’m certainly aware of [Paul] Steiger from The Wall Street Journal — but there’s already a model for ProPublica out there and that’s called the Center for Public Integrity. I’ve actually done a couple of big investigations for them.
The Center for Public Integrity, which was started by a guy name Charles Lewis who had been a producer at 60 Minutes. Lewis put together a great team of editors and writers and database people and got corporate money — foundation money, like ProPublica — and started doing these amazingly broad and deep investigations of power. Also, when CNN started getting serious, Ted Turner put together a giant investigative team of 40 people back in the late 80s.
So in a way, ProPublica is not that revolutionary. I’m excited for it and I hope it’s as good as CNN was for a while and the Center for Public Integrity still is.
Do you think that’s a good model going forward where investigative journalists aren’t tied to a specific publication but rather to an organization that gets its funding from other sources?
I think it’s an important part of the mix. These groups have shown that different models can work and I hope ProPublica is the same way.
You’ve been an investigative reporter for more than three decades. How has the Internet changed the discipline?
It’s certainly made certain parts of investigative reporting quicker. I love to be able to go online, even at my fairly middling level of knowledge, and dig out stuff, sometimes in a minute, more often in an hour that I might never have found before. A few years ago, one of the big environmental magazine called OnEarth, asked me to do an in-depth story about John D. Graham, a guy real high up in the Bush White House who was completely gutting environmentalism.
This was an assignment so I didn’t know that much about Graham. One of the first things I did was look at different Web sites at Harvard [where Graham went] and some of the organizations that he belonged to. One of the things I learned was that at Wake Forest, when he was still an undergrad, he got into debating in a big way and won all these awards.
This turned out to be real key to the story in several ways. First of all, it provided some of the narrative thread of the story because his debating background came all through the rest of his career. It also helped open the door because he was naturally suspicious that this lifetime investigative reporter writing for an environmental magazine would do a fair job. He really stonewalled me for a while. Then, in one of my approaches to him, I mentioned that I had been doing some background on his debating life and found on the Wake Forest Web site that he had met his wife on the debating team. That seemed to work wonders with him. He was impressed that I even cared who he was married to and all of a sudden he was somewhat cooperative. I eventually got the face-to-face interview in the old executive office building.
Even more revolutionary is this small corner of investigative reporting they now call computer-assisted reporting, where you can take gigantic government databases and turn them into understandable information. That’s what’s really amazing. I’ve seen some of that from the beginning and I’ve seen how that’s changed investigative journalism. The possibilities are almost endless now.
You mean because of the opportunities for number crunching?
The number crunching but what that number crunching reveals, the patterns that it shows you about the distribution of affordable housing or the number of sex discrimination cases across the country or whatever so you can start your reporting with an incredible knowledge base. You can look for patterns that the data suggests. It would have taken you years before that just to get to that stage.
What’s your hope for the book?
I guess I hope for what every author hopes for, short of best-sellerdom: that it gets read by people who care about any number of matters in this society, about corporate gigantism, about journalism and its role, about gender equality and feminism.
It’s also a damn good story. I give my editors at Norton a lot of credit. I proposed this as a cradle to grave biography of Ida Tarbell. Obviously, I knew John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil would play a big role, but only after I wrote the book and [my editor] started looking at it, did he say, “This is fine. We could publish this, but what about making Rockefeller more of an equal character. What about making it a narrative about the collision course.” So I did.
Three tips for becoming an investigative reporter
1. Relentless curiosity: “You need to be one of those people who’s always asking, why and how and how come,” Weinberg says.
2. Systematic thinking: “Your training needs to include not only the basics of reporting, but you need to learn to think through your material,” Weinberg says. “Always build a chronology of the person or thing you are investigating.”
3. Continuing your education: Keep up with the latest developments in technology that can help make your job easier.
Noah Davis is mediabistro.com’s associate editor and co-editor of FishbowlNY.
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