Muckraking for change

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ramparts magazine, were it still alive and in print, would’ve done it’s very best to dig up dirt on every opposing viewpoint in order to support black candidate, Barack Obama.
New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner, describes Ramparts early switch from religious origin to revolutionary. “It lost religion, picked up a vibe in the Bay Area air and, like the understudy from “Hair” who goes on to become Janis Joplin, morphed into something wild: a slick, muckraking magazine that was the most freewheeling thing on most American newsstands during the second half of the 1960s.”
Although not always using the finest journalistic techniques, the muckraking magazine known as Ramparts was a publication that could’ve been compared to Rolling Stone, Playboy or Wired, in their earlier periods. According to Garner, “In 1968 its circulation was nearly 250,000, more than double that of The Nation.”
In the words of one of it’s writer’s, Adam Hochshild, the key to ramparts was to “find an exposé that major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a big enough splash so they can’t afford to ignore it . . . and then publicize it in a way that plays the press off against each other.”
Each publication’s monumental glory days continue to affect the choices of their editors in terms of content decisions. Born in San Francisco, a quarterly magazine only lasting from 1962 to 1975, Ramparts successfully implemented the art of muckraking in journalism. The term “muckraking” literally means, “exposing scandal.”
The publication successfully achieved this goal by giving power to radicalism, revealing in 1966, the Central Intelligence Agency’s partnership with Michigan State University “in the training of police officers in South Vietnam and the writing of the South Vietnamese Constitution.” The magazine also had a strong influence in turning Martin Luther King Jr. against the Vietnam War. Ramparts published the Che Guevara diaries, supported the Black Panthers, and all around promoted the idea of political change.
Ramparts was able to advance its’ employed journalists careers, due to the publication’s great success and volume of readership. Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, Adam Hochschild, David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and Jann Wenner became successful writers from this important kick-off point.
According to New York Times scoop writer Jack Shafer,
“the magazine showed that the rarest asset in journalism is picking the right set of questions, usually the ones nobody else has the sense to ask.”
Peter Richardson, a SFSU professor and author, wrote a book detailing the life and times of the publication, “A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.”

Warren Hinckle