Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
Investigative journalism, which is critical to a healthy democracy, comes at a high cost. The return on investment, though, is substantial. Ida Tarbell's willingness to dig into Standard Oil's egregious business practices bolstered efforts to pass the Clayton Antitrust Act and to create the Federal Trade Commission. Upton Sinclair's daring investigation into the meatpacking plants of Chicago likewise resulted in a long overdue regulatory response.
These and other muckrakers sacrificed to provide the public with the information required to fulfill democratic duties – to identify communal problems, to debate solutions and to monitor the effectiveness of those solutions.
More than a century later, the costs of investigative journalism have only increased. A Washington Post exposé on the D.C. police, for instance, required a team of nine reporters, editors and specialists, involved eight months of research and investigation, and cost nearly $500,000. The resulting changes to police practices may have produced $73.6 million in societal benefits – and that's a conservative estimate. The expense and the returns of the Post’s story are not atypical. It often takes six months to produce an investigative news piece. Yet, such reporting can lead to swift and significant regulatory responses.
Those benefits, though, often don’t carry over to the publisher’s bottom line. As recounted by Professor Neil Netenal:
[I]n 2016, the non-profit news magazine Mother Jones spent some $350,000 to produce an in-depth investigation exposing the brutal working conditions for inmates in private prisons. The blockbuster story ... attracted more than a million readers and triggered a Department of Justice announcement that it would end its use of private prisons. Despite the piece’s impact, Mother Jones earned only $5,000 in revenue from the banner ads that ran with the piece.
Clearly, from the perspective of publishers, investigative journalism doesn’t pencil out. That’s a huge problem for society. Think of the abuses that have gone uncovered, the wrongs that haven’t been righted and the practices that have perpetuated because of inadequate support for this sort of democratic digging. The list of topics that should have and could have been covered sooner and in more detail is long. And, importantly, that list is likely to be longer in the thousands of communities that lack any sort of local newspaper, let alone an investigative journalism team.
Thankfully, private and nonprofit organizations aren’t parking in the reserve lot – they’re driving change by funding new and necessary efforts to train and support investigative journalists. The Tarbell Fellowship, which embeds early-career journalists in newsrooms, is a great example. Fellows spend 12 months covering pressing societal topics, such as governance of emerging technologies. More generally, fellows are expected to cover problems that, if solved, would have a huge impact, that are capable of being addressed in a relatively timely fashion, and are currently being undercovered. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to financial support from Open Philanthropy this extra investigatory news power comes at no cost to the publisher.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that Benjamin Franklin, himself a publisher, is alleged to have said that the Founders gave us democracy, “if we can keep it.” Franklin, Tarbell, Sinclair and other muckrakers understood the costs – and the benefits – of quality journalism. The rest of us have missed our deadline, but there’s still time to act. You can support Open Philanthropy, advocate for government grants to investigative journalism and financially back your local paper. Here’s to headlines that matter and journalism that informs rather than enrages.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.