Ida Tarbell

And that's the contradiction his contemporaries couldn't resolve.

Ida Tarbell writes this devastating exposé of Standard Oil, and the public outrage leads to the antitrust breakup in 1911.

And here's the twist that always gets me.

The breakup makes him richer.

I mean, I knew about FAIR before I knew about Project Censored.

Janine, you were talking about this structural thing, and I see FAIR in the long lineage, right? Really, you know, going back to Ida Tarbell, sticking it to Standard Oil.

Upton Sinclair, Brass Check, George Seldes, In Fact, of course, IF, Izzy, Stone, and, you know, the weekly that Stone had.

Up through the 80s, influenced, of course, by Ben Bigdickian on ownership.

Think about all the journalists in the alternative press, from Ida B.

Wells, to Ida Tarbell, and the other muckrakers.

And the media critics and reformers, the people who called out yellow journalism in the early 20th century, the ones who led the public interest moment in the middle of the last century that brought us public broadcasting and other really valuable changes.

And all the people still fighting now, folks in the alternative and nonprofit media, independent journalists, and yes, folks working in corporate and mainstream media who do what they can to report the most important stuff.

Someday, if he has been true, the facts will come to light and justify him.

Coming back on the train, I picked up Ida Tarbell's Life of Lincoln and read again the story of those bitter years of civil war.

In the West was Fremont, brilliant, impetuous, conceited, the popular idol.

Without consultation or authority from the President, he issued in his own name an emancipation proclamation.

That has come back with its own unique digital characteristics in this moment of what he calls cloud capital.

But you can understand a lot of what's going on now by thinking about feudalism in the same way that you can understand a lot of what's going on now by going back and reading Ida Tarbell.

It was the woman who felled the empire of John D. Rockefeller by writing a series of investigative journalism articles in a nationally syndicated magazine.

as revenge for him having ruined her father, who was a Pennsylvania oilman, before going on to becoming the most important suffragist in America and giving all the barn burning speeches that led the movement to victory.

And what you ended up getting from that is is some of the best investigative journalism in history.

Ida Tarbell took on Standard Oil.

Lincoln Steffen exposed urban corruption.

Cosmopolitan Magazine, yes, the one that you are thinking of, they published a series known as The Treason of the Senate.

Six years later, Henry D. Lloyd, in a powerful book entitled wealth against commonwealth, attacked in scathing language certain trusts which had destroyed their rivals and bribed public officials.

In 1903, Ms. Ida Tarbell, an author of established reputation in the historical field, gave to the public an account of the Standard Oil Company, revealing the ruthless methods of that corporation in crushing competition.

About the same time, Lincoln Steffens exposed the sordid character of politics in several municipalities in a series of articles bearing the painful heading, The Shame of the Cities.

The critical spirit appeared in almost every form, in weekly and monthly magazines, in essays and pamphlets, in editorials and news stories, in novels like Churchill's Coniston and Sinclair's The Jungle.