A Call for Muckrakers
The North Shore of Chicago is home to the kind of money that just bought the White House.
Waves from Lake Michigan splash on beaches or rocky shores lined with mansions owned by Chicago’s upper crust. The late W. Clement Stone, an insurance tycoon who was Richard Nixon’s Elon Musk, had a huge place in Winnetka, a tony suburb in the heart of the treed enclave. The late Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defense Secretary and architect of the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq War, had North Shone roots.
Henry Demarest Lloyd Memorial, Winnetka, Illinois, 1900/1925
Tucked into a thicket of bushes near a church and a lakeside park just off the main road that cuts through the suburb is something that’s easy to miss unless you know about it: A bronze and granite statue of the late Henry Demarest Lloyd, a wayward son of Winnetka and a pioneering muckraker whose journalism probably wouldn’t play well with the wealthy residents who now populate the place.
Lloyd comes to mind because of the recent spate of stories, threats and surveys attacking Lloyd’s craft — journalism and journalists. Although the most persistent and serious assaults come from President-elect Donald Trump, the criticism of the Fourth Estate comes from within, too.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, cited the decline of the press’ ranking in a Gallup poll about trust in the media to justify his controversial 2024 decision not to endorse a candidate for president, which, in effect, amounted to an endorsement of Donald Trump.
“Most people believe the media is biased,” Bezos wrote in an op-ed piece justifying his decision and denigrating the journalists who work for him. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”
The Gallup survey Bezos cited ranked journalists just below Congress in public esteem, making the press the least trusted group among ten civic and political institutions in America.
Some of the criticism is justified. Like any craft or profession, journalism has its bad actors who write, air or edit slanted stories. The bad apples embarrass ethical journalists, by far the majority of the profession swept up in the relentless criticism leveled by Trump and his MAGA acolytes.
But Bezos’s essay published in the Washington Post also exposes how billionaires and many press critics don’t really understand the mission of the craft in which they invest their money and critical energy. Journalism is not — and never was — a popularity contest designed to get good ratings. In fact, if journalists are doing their job well, they will anger or lose some members of their audiences. In short, they won’t poll well, and they shouldn’t. The real issue is if their exposés and stories improve things and stand the test of time.
Lloyd’s career exemplifies the anger, controversy and results that a good journalist engenders in times like the ones we now live. Reared in an educated but not excessively wealthy family, Lloyd married well. His father-in-law was a rich man who had a significant ownership interest in the Chicago Tribune, where Lloyd went to work in 1872.
Within a relatively short time, he became chief editorial writer at the height of the Gilded Age. Rapid industrialization, significant technological advances, mass immigration, the rise of tycoons known as “robber barons,” and significant accumulation of wealth by a small upper class characterized the era — many of the same forces currently at work in America.
The gilded greed gave Lloyd plenty of grist for his work. As a muckraker and pioneering investigative journalist, Lloyd achieved notoriety for exposing industrial monopolies and corporate corruption. Much of his groundbreaking work appeared in publications other than the august Chicago Tribune, a subject of one of my books.
He wrote “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” for the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, a trailblazing exposé of the Standard Oil Company’s unethical conduct under the leadership of John D Rockefeller. Lloyd’s stories appeared long before another pioneering muckraker, Ida Tarbell, used meticulous reporting to spark the public outrage that led to the break-up of the oil monopoly in 1911.
A fierce advocate for free trade and labor rights, Lloyd wrote several notable books and articles, including “Wealth and Commonwealth,” an expansion of his critique of monopolies and their impact on society and workers. His journalism helped shape public opinion on corporate power and the development of antitrust legislation in America.
It's hard to say precisely if Lloyd’s Winnetka neighbors reacted to his journalism with the same skepticism that Bezos aired in his Washington Post piece, which drew much attention. Sophisticated polling wasn’t as widespread as now, and Lloyd’s Winnetka was a different place, more like small town than a suburb with ostentatious displays of wealth.
Photo of journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The media wasn’t the same during Lloyd’s tenure, either. Americans relied on the written word for news and information, primarily newspapers, magazines, novels and pamphlets, not news gabfests on cable TV and social media. Journalism in the Gilded Age had its fair share of sensationalism and bias, and newspapers faced criticism for trying to boost circulation with stories that favored fiction over fact.
Interestingly, though, the press of the Gilded Age remained relatively popular despite the challenges they faced, a contrast to the current situation. They wrote of scandals and exposés, influenced public debate on important issues and took strong stands on their editorial pages, precisely the kind of journalism that is being abandoned by owners more interested in the first quarter than the First Amendment.
The investigative reporting pioneered by Lloyd became a staple of many newspapers and magazines. Reporters such as Lloyd published stories without fear or favor. The better ones, like Lloyd and Tarbell, were people of high principle.
Lloyd, for instance, upset his family with his stories and strong stands on the rights of immigrants and the working classes. Nevertheless, he publicly defended labor activists arrested and unjustly convicted of crimes after the controversial Haymarket riots In Chicago during 1868. His support of the activists so incensed his father-in-law that he disinherited his daughter Jesse, who was Lloyd’s wife. The incensed father-in-law must have later changed his will, because Jesse inherited his fortune when he died in 1890, thirteen years before Lloyd passed away at age fifty-six..
Were he alive today, Lloyd would probably be called “an enemy of the people” or a Marxist because his work angered Americans of influence, wealth and power like the people who are about to take over the American government. In his day, though, Lloyd’s journalism was popular. He wrote about issues that concerned working people and would have scoffed at critics who denigrate journalists for doing their jobs.
The surveys conducted by pollsters such as Gallup have their faults. The one that Bezos cited in his Washington Post op-ed shows how political the polls have become. Gallup reported that fifty-four percent of Democrats have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the press while only twenty-seven percent of independent voters feel that way. A mere twelve percent of Republicans voice trust in the media.
The Gallup numbers are not great for the media. Many reforms and experiments are underway in to reverse the trends. However, the numbers are skewed by the massive changes in the way the public accesses the work of journalists since the advent of cable television in the 1960s and 1970s — developments masterfully documented by Princeton’s Markus Prior, a professor of public affairs and an expert on the media’s impact on politics. Prior’s work suggests the proliferation of media choices — a trend that has accelerated with the advent of social media — created wide gaps in media literacy that foster the polarization threatening the nation’s democracy.
Markus Prior’s research says the transformation created two groups that changed the landscape of media and made it far more complex and challenging than in Lloyd’s days. Interest in the news declined sharply among less educated Americans who say their media options expand to entertainment shows, while it rose among the educated class that flocked to the news shows made popular by cable television and streaming services. The result is a brand of journalism that resembles entertainment, a shift that naturally erodes trust in the press and creates the acute polarization that increasingly characterizes our elections.
Journalists such as Lloyd didn’t have to contend with contemporary media challenges and the polarization they’ve created. Nevertheless, today’s journalists could learn from his work. Engraved in the granite pedestal of his statue in Winnetka are the words: “Society should give every man not his daily bread but a chance to earn his daily bread.” Lloyd wrote about — and advocated for — the eight-hour workday; safeguards against child labor; improvements in working conditions for women and children, labor rights for immigrants, a key issue at the time; “No tenements for some and castles for others.” In other words, he wrote about issues important to working people. He used his journalism to earn their trust, not to expect it.
—James O’Shea
James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.