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is more, in the interest of good business, balancing the budget, and
practical politics, we had better not even talk about it.
7.
The Not-Muckraking Business
The muckraker's chief remaining asset today is his nuisance
value, and even that is not easy to exploit. So firmly integrated is
the existing community of interest that the muckraker is rarely
very dangerous no matter how authentic the muck that he uncovers.
Moreover, blackmail is a dangerous business for both parties con–
cerned. At various times I have received verbal suggestions that I
might enjoy a subsidized trip to the Riviera or to Mexico.
It
has
also been suggested that I do some highly paid "research" forcer–
tain commercial companies. But I am confident that if I had
yielded to any of these blandishments, the payoff would have been
meagre. All that a briber needs is one small scrap of evidence that
the muckraker is corruptible. By threatening exposure he can then
eliminate the muckraker's nuisance value.
What is more likely to happen, judging from the writer's
experience is that the muckraker enables public relations experts
and lawyers to turn a neat profit by protecting, or pretending to
protect,
~eir
clients from damage. In such situations, the public
relations counsel invariably assures his client that the muckraker
is twice as dangerous as he actually is, just as the professional stool
pigeon tells the boss that the shop is full of "reds." Naturally, the
public relations counsel has a friendly and grateful feeling for
those ardent spirits, the muckrakers, since they are, after a fashion,
his collaborators. I recall one occasion when, after I had been very
expensively dined by a very expensive public relations counsel, he
shook my hand fondly in farewell and said: "Go home, now; don't
get hit by a taxi, and cover your precious self up tight. You're my
Dionne quintuplets."
Toward the Coordination of Muckraking
While the foregoing roughly sketched sequence is scarcely
sufficient to
prove
a trend, the general drift of the facts is a matter
of common observation among journalists and politicians. Serious
economic and social muckraking-naturally one takes no account
of run-of-the-mill gang-busting and scandal mongering-has ceased
to be a profitable department of commercial newspaper and
periodical journalism. As for the newer forms of communication,
