• •
Ida B. Wells-Barnett's 1892 pamphlet
Southern Horrors documented lynching in the United States, exposing in the pages of black-owned newspapers as a campaign of oppression and intimidation against African Americans. A white mob destroyed her newspaper press and office in retaliation for her reporting. •
Ida Tarbell's 1904 book,
The History of the Standard Oil Company, exposed the nefarious practices and methods of the monopoly of the company, and led to its dismantling. •
Upton Sinclair's 1905 book
The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in American meatpacking plants, and led to the creation of the
Food and Drug Administration. •
Nellie Bly, a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman in the late 19th century, famously feigned insanity as part of her 1887
undercover investigation into and subsequent exposé regarding the inner-workings of the
Women's Lunatic Asylum in New York City. Published to wide acclaim as a series of articles in the
New York World which were later compiled and further detailed in her book
Ten Days in a Mad-House, Bly's revelations led to both a grand jury investigation of the asylum and increased funding for the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. • Between 1972 and 1974 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered and exposed a variety of incriminating information regarding President Richard Nixon's 1968–1972 presidential campaign. The information exposed, prompted Nixon's resignation in 1974 and was then on recognized as the
Watergate scandal. •
Bill Dedman's 1988 investigation,
The Color of Money, for
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on
racial discrimination by
mortgage lenders in middle-income neighborhoods, received the 1989
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and was an influential early example of computer-assisted reporting or
database journalism. •
Brian Deer's British press award-winning investigation for
The Sunday Times of London into the worldwide
MMR vaccine controversy which revealed that research, published by
The Lancet, associating the children's vaccine with autism was fraudulent. •
John M. Crewdson of the
Chicago Tribune wrote a 1996 article proposing the installment of
defibrillators on American airliners. Crewdson argued that based on his research and analysis, "Medical kits and defibrillators would be economically justified if they saved just 3 lives each year." Soon after the article's publication, airlines began installing defibrillators on planes, and the devices began to show up in airports and other public spaces. Ten years after installing defibrillators,
American Airlines reported that 80 lives had been saved by the machines. •
Hopewell Chin'ono, the award-winning Zimbabwean journalist who investigated and exposed the Covid-gate scandal in Zimbabwe in June 2020. US$60 million was siphoned to a shadowy company called Drax that is linked to President
Emmerson Mnangagwa. The exposure resulted in the dismissal and arrest of Health Minister Obbidiah Moyo. Hopewell Chin'ono was arrested on flimsy charges in an apparent attempt to silence him. • The
Boston Globe's Spotlight investigation into sexual abuse in the
Archdiocese of Boston, which earned a
Pulitzer Prize ==See also==