Finding Truth, Then and Now

Another installment in this month’s theme, “Searching for the Truth”

In thinking about this month’s theme, I immediately came back to a story I related in a post last year. When reporter Nellie Bly was 23 years old, she had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York so she could tell the world about the horrors visited upon the inmates there. This was in 1887 and there were many horrors indeed. The living quarters were bare and poorly heated. The food was cold, tasteless, and sometimes spoiled, with spiders or other insects occasionally writhing around on the plates. The sanitary conditions were awful and many of the nurses were tyrannical, refusing to treat their charges with human kindness or to show any signs of sympathy whatsoever.

After 10 days at the asylum, Nellie secured her release with the help of her editors at the New York World. And then she shared what she had seen with the newspaper’s readers. On October 9 and October 16, 1887, Nellie took readers “Behind Asylum Doors” with a total of 17 columns of detailed prose chronicling every aspect of her incarceration. After other newspapers picked up the story, the city launched an investigation that resulted in improvements in the way the inmates were treated and a sizable increase in the asylum’s budget.

Nellie Bly pioneered this sort of “stunt journalism,” where an investigative reporter injects herself into the story by going undercover and writing about her experiences. At a time when women were rarely assigned anything but society and fashion articles, Nellie regularly put herself at risk to uncover crimes, corruption, and other abuses. Though her story has been told before, I was anxious to take my own look at what drove this woman to search for and report the truth in such dramatic fashion. The more I learned about her, the more fascinated I became. My biography of Nellie Bly, Bylines, will be out from National Geographic in October.

Though technology has made it possible to spread news (and gossip) instantaneously today, it’s fortunate that there are still many journalists on newspapers, magazines, and even TV news shows and Internet sites who doggedly investigate stories to get at the truth. One such investigation that affected me deeply was accomplished not by a writer, but by a photographer. Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his “provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti,” according to the citation by the Pulitzer Committee. Shooting in black and white and using only spare captions, Farrell managed to convey the poignancy and drama of lives forever changed by nature’s violence. It’s impossible to look at his photographs and not be moved. If you're interested in seeing them, they're available on the Pulitzer Prize Web site.