Global Muckraking
100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Crusading journalists from Sinclair Lewis to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have played a central role in American politics: checking abuses of power, revealing corporate misdeeds, and exposing government corruption. Muckraking journalism is part and parcel of American democracy. But how many people know about the role that muckraking has played around the world?
This groundbreaking new book presents the most important examples of world-changing journalism, spanning one hundred years and every continent. Carefully curated by prominent international journalists working in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, Global Muckraking includes Ken Saro-Wiwa's defense of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta; Horacio Verbitsky's uncovering of the gruesome disappearance of political detainees in Argentina; Gareth Jones's coverage of the Ukraine famine of 1932-33; missionary newspapers' coverage of Chinese foot binding in the nineteenth century; Dwarkanath Ganguli's exposé of the British "coolie" trade in nineteenth-century Assam, India; and many others.
Edited by the noted author and journalist Anya Schiffrin, Global Muckraking is a sweeping introduction to international journalism that has galvanized the world's attention. In an era when human rights are in the spotlight and the fate of newspapers hangs in the balance, here is both a riveting read and a sweeping argument for why the world needs long-form investigative reporting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Muckrakers and their published work provide the much needed spark for addressing political corruption, fraud, and bad business practices in America and throughout the world, according to a new book by Schiffrin, the director of the media and communication program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. As digital information rapidly replaces print media, Schiffrin (who also happens to be the daughter of the late Andr Schiffrin, the New Press founder) revisits some of the published pieces that have sent shock waves through readers, including a telling 1896 expos of the indentured "coolie" system in the English colonies; a gripping 1904 British story on atrocities in the Congo; a bitter 1924 chronicle of the penal colony Devil's Island, ; an inflammatory 1986 article on the devastating aftermath of a Chinese earthquake in Tangshan; and a shocking 2013 yarn of a corporation ignoring the men battling chronic kidney disease from working in the sugar cane industry. There are 47 articles by leading journalists, past and present, divided into sections like labor abuses, corruption, anti-colonialism, the environment and natural disasters, famine, military and police, rural life, and women. Looking back, Schiffrin's impressive survey of the crusading media is essential for those concerned with the business of news and its bold history of courageous messengers.
