The Scoop On Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer made extraordinary newspapers: as broad as a fellow’s arms could reach, full of great stories about thirsty men on Mars, body parts in a river, lists of tax dodgers, enormous cartoons in joyous color,  tales of corruptors, swindlers, killers, divorcees, and any other miscreants inside government and out.

“Pulitzer believed newspaper stories should be short and smart and snappy,” a narrator tells us in Oren Rudavsky’s new documentary:  “ Joseph Pulitzer, Voice of the People.”  He aimed , she said, to excite  in his readers “tingling sensations as plentiful as mushrooms.”

This German-speaking Hungarian Jew who came to the United States as an improvident adolescent  in 1864,     took hold of every opportunity. He learned English by reading Dickens, met powerful men at chess games, was drawn into the news biz and , eventually, became the publisher of newspapers. He told his  reporters, “Bait hook with what readers like, not what you like,” adding solemnly “accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a woman.” 

Now Pulitzer was not the kind of publisher who waited for news to happen. His reporters were dispatched to find stories and they wrote about the impoverished in crowded, filthy, dangerous sections of New York City, where youngsters sleeping on tenement roofs for a breath of air sometimes fell to their deaths by morning. While the Gilded Age carried on in other parts of the city, the poor, many of them immigrants, worked in factories without protections, certainty of employment, unemployment insurance or welfare of any kind. He sent a young reporter, Nellie Bly, out to a warehouse for the insane where she spent more than a week,  and then wrote an exposé about the “rat trap” it was for the pitiful men and women there. 

Pulitzer cooked up crusades, too,  like the one urging children to donate small change  to build a platform for Lady Liberty in New York Harbor— she arrived from France  without one; and his every aim as a newspaperman was to speak for the poor and needy. He shamed the city government to stop charging pedestrians a penny to cross the new and splendid Brooklyn Bridge. A penny at the time would buy lunch.

As ever, Rudavsky, who weekends here in Salisbury, tells terrific stories with narrators, film clips and sometimes touching latter-day interventions such as the waiter cutting up steak on a dinner plate for Pulitzer who could no longer see.

And sometimes, these stories ring close to home, as when Pulitzer’s paper, The World, exposed financial treachery in  the handling of billions spent on the Panama Canal. 

President Theodore Roosevelt, outraged, wanted to sue Pulitzer for “criminal libel” (which does not exist) and took his case to the Supreme Court which found for Pulitzer and his paper.

Evidently, a narrator notes, such a ruling indicated the president is not above the law.

On Sun. March 17, at 1 p.m. The Moviehouse in Millerton, will present a special screening of the film followed by a discussion with Sandy Padwe, former acting dean at the School of Journalism, Columbia University, Kimberly Drelich of The Day newspaper based in New London, Conn. and producer/director Oren Rudavsky will lead a conversation about press issues;  First Amendment rights and limits; investigative reporting’s role; crusading journalism and sensationalism; the first page vs. the editorial page; the bottom line role in a profit-challenged industry; the risks of getting stories wrong; the dangers of reporting the news today and the significance of the Pulitzer Prize. The film will be shown on Friday, March 15 at 6:10 p.m. and Saturday, March 16 at 6:10 p.m. Director Oren Rudavsky will be present and will host an audience Q&A after both screenings.

The Moviehouse is located at 48 Main Street, Millerton, www.themoviehouse.net