Muckraking in the Modern Era
Legal intimidation has made exposés like this one rare. It’s time for journalists to reclaim our roots.
In 1887, a 23-year-old journalist got herself checked into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. When she emerged, she wrote about patients tied together with ropes, abusive staff and ubiquitous vermin, “lunatics” treated with nothing more restorative than ice baths, and, perhaps most disturbingly, patients who seemed to be perfectly sane, dumped there by a society that had few safety nets for women who were single, poor, and often immigrants.
Serialized by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Nellie Bly’s accounts (later collected in a book called
