Word: sinclairs
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Editor Wilbert Rideau and Associate Editor Billy Sinclair cannot afford to play fast and loose with the facts. For one thing, they have to live close to their readers. For another, their readers include murderers, rapists, armed robbers and other criminals with a history of violent overreaction when provoked. Explains Rideau: "You're in a world where everybody plays for keeps...
Their world is the sprawling 4,100-inmate Louisiana state prison complex in Angola, 35 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. Their voice is the Angolite, the most probing and literate inmate publication in the U.S. Last week Rideau, 38, and Sinclair, 35, both convicted murderers serving life terms, won a prestigious George Polk Award for special-interest reporting. One article cited was Rideau's chilling account of homosexual rape and subjugation behind bars. Another story submitted to the Polk judges was an investigative report by Sinclair raising the possibility of misfeasance in the murder of a prisoner five years...
...UPTON SINCLAIR was a muckraker when it was a proud title. At some point in this century muckraker lost its prestige and became synonymous with troublemakers, often reporters, who looked for dirt where little existed. But the Sinclair tradition carried on with reporters like Edward R. Murrow using the television camera to expose evil in a more sophisticated America...
...1970s, an age of specialization, reporters like Murrow had metamorphosed into "investigative journalists" like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the enterprising Washington Post reporters who cracked the smilingly slick evil of Richard Nixon. They continued the tradition, and if they didn't have Sinclair's poetic ability, drive and something of his anger, they were heroes of a sort to a shocked America...
...bottom line--it gossips rather than exposes. This book will not reform the court, perhaps because it doesn't need to be reformed. The book is certainly a detailed account, but it is not investigative reporting in the Murrow or Bernstein or Woodward tradition. It is not Upton Sinclair muckraking--in fact, it veers close to the type of muckraking that made the word unstylish. It is truly "Inside the Supreme Court," as the jacket cover boasts. But 468 pages later, the boast sounds pretty empty...