Some Journalism Blasts From the Past   

Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist
By Brooke Kroeger, "Times Books"
Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity
By Neal Gabler, "Knopf"
More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell's Lifetime in Journalism
Edited by Robert C. Kochersberger Jr. , "University of Tennessee Press"
Nothin' But Good Times Ahead
By Molly Ivins, " Vintage"

Journalism history is thick with characters and personalities, and the past year brought interesting studies of several. Here are some notable ones:

Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist
By Brooke Kroeger
Times Books
632 pages, $27.50

Indeed, she was "the best reporter in America," Arthur Brisbane wrote in the New York Journal on her death in 1922.

Bly took her pen name at the Pittsburgh Dispatch because ladies of the day didn't use their true identities in the papers. She went on to cover wars, labor strife, foreign affairs and boxing matches. She ran her own factory, the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., where she designed plant machinery, personally held 25 patents, and created "a model of social welfare for her 1,500 employees." And she devoted later years and fortune to the plight of unwed mothers and orphans.

Bly's range was striking. She provided analytical coverage from Mexico and addressed leading social topics, such as labor issues and sexual politics.

But, true enough, it was the audacious masquerades and posings that cinched her fame. For her first assignment at the New York World she feigned insanity, got herself committed to an asylum and produced a sensational series, "Ten Days in a Mad-House."

She also posed as, among many others, a patent medicine merchant (to bribe a powerful lobbyist), a charity hospital patient, a chorus girl and even a female job applicant at newspapers (where she was routinely patronized). In her best-remembered stunt, she circled the globe in 72 days, faster than anyone else in history or literature, beating Phileas Fogg's "Around the World in Eighty Days."

Kroeger, a veteran wire service and magazine writer, tells this remarkable story briskly and thoroughly. Her work is both a good read and an important historical rescue mission.

Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity
By Neal Gabler
Knopf
684 pages, $30

Still another shadowy figure is Walter Winchell, best remembered perhaps as the reedy-voiced narrator of the old "Untouchables" series. But Winchell, too, earned status as an icon: the man who perfected the gossip column and demolished "the long-standing barrier between the private and the public."

Neal Gabler, an author and former movie critic, has written a detailed but fast-moving biography of this man who was a feared force in journalism for 40 years.

In Winchell's heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, two-thirds of American adults either read his daily column (written for Hearst but syndicated in more than 2,000 papers) or heard his radio show. Hemingway even dubbed him, hyperbolically one would hope, "the greatest newspaper man that ever lived."

Often controversial, Winchell began as something of a common person's champion, with his signature radio greeting, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America..."

But Winchell hardened as he grew older, rupturing friendships, embracing the likes of Joseph McCarthy, cozying with both J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and various mob figures, and winding up as a "cruel, spiteful rumormonger." At his funeral in 1972, his daughter was the only mourner.

Gabler's book is especially valuable because he sees here not just one man's story but a parable about "the cutthroat world of celebrity."

As Gabler perceptively observes, Winchell understood that gossip had a "bitter subtext." It offered ordinary people "a weapon of empowerment," a chance to gain symbolic intimacy with the celebrated, to mock their foibles and sometimes to engineer their downfall. Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, as Winchell strutted his way across the public stage, he too was headed for comeuppance. One by one, his friends and supporters fell away, and in 1967 Hearst canceled his column, ending a 38-year run.

More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell's Lifetime in Journalism
Edited by Robert C. Kochersberger Jr.
University of Tennessee Press
242 pages, $36.95

Like her contemporary Bly, Ida Tarbell is another writer whose vague, semi-mythic status lives on, even though her actual work remains obscure.

In this carefully edited collection of 26 of her pieces, Robert Kochersberger shows that Tarbell was "more than a muckraker." She was an early literary journalist who "helped to invent modern journalism and..was a more rigorous, systematic journalist than almost anyone before or since."

The selections cover topics ranging from Abraham Lincoln's funeral to mining safety to female inventors to efforts to raise the "moral standard" of Cincinnati.

Especially striking is how Tarbell crafted evidence-based journalistic essays in a passionate but even-toned voice. In her landmark series on John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Co., for instance, she managed to endorse both the pursuit of profit and the need for humane management. In her many articles on women, she defended both equal-pay-for-equal-work and her belief that a woman's central duty was child-rearing and homemaking.

Kochersberger, a North Carolina State journalism professor, offers thoughtful, succinct introductions to each selection.

Nothin' But Good Times Ahead
By Molly Ivins
Vintage
256 pages, $12

Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Molly Ivins is not yet a historical character. But her latest collection, reissued in paperback, deserves a mention now that the Republican Ascendancy is at hand.

Like most humorists, she's at her best as an outsider torching the in-crowd. So Ivins, a left-leaning populist, will no doubt surge now in her patented role, as a wiseass who's genuinely wise.

This collection (disappointingly, it has neither a table of contents nor index) sights her usual targets: hapless politicians and legislators. But Ivins also engages everything from author Camille Paglia ("a crassly egocentric, raving twit") to a boar chase through Austin.

Not the least of her victims are her "brethren and sistren" in the press, and this book is worth its cost for its description (see the preface) of what political reporting has to do with monkey feces.