Muckraking Comes Home.

Between 1903 and 1910 muckraking magazines had exposed corruption in American government and business with great fervor and to great acclaim. The magazine publisher Robert J. Collier began to wonder why the newspapers in American cities had not unearthed those stories. He asked Will Irwin, a veteran reporter for the New York Sun and former McClure's magazine editor, to investigate the American newspaper industry. Irwin spent a year traveling around the country interviewing publishers, editors, reporters, and readers. He found that while some newspapers held to strict professional codes of independence and courage, others shaped their news coverage to the tastes and beliefs of their advertisers or their owners. His fourteen-part series, published in 1911 in Collier's as "The American Newspaper," was far more than an exposé; it was a major history of American journalism.

A Varied...