The publicity of journalism has long been central to anti-corruption politics in the United States. This article explores relations between journalism and corruption in early twentieth-century Chicago and shows how newspapers could be used by corrupt politicians to consolidate and even constitute their power. By examining the three-term mayoralty of William Hale ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, the article considers a range of media strategies, from press-baiting to propaganda and boosterism, that fuelled public controversies about press hypocrisy and limited journalism’s anti-corruption potential. Thompson’s Chicago sheds light on broader debates about the politics of journalism in capitalist societies with commercial media environments; it also helps illuminate wider histories of corruption in America.
The rise of the muckrakers in the early twentieth century made journalism a key mechanism for combating corruption in the United States. Lincoln Steffens argued in The shame of the cities (1904) that journalism should expose corrupt practices and scandals so that public opinion could rally against them.Footnote 1 This argument continues to shape histories of American politics and debates about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Footnote 2 Few now frame machine politics itself as necessarily or simply ‘corrupt’, for urban parties were complex organizations that provided welfare and employment, as well as real power, to working-class and immigrant constituencies.Footnote 3 George Washington Plunkitt, the New York politician and Tammany Hall partisan, suggested that ‘Steffens means well but, like all reformers’,
— source cambridge.org | Tom Arnold-Forster | 27 Jan 2022