No politically contentious issue has ever escaped the eye and the pen of partisan and activists journalists. Labor journalist John Swinton used his press to campaign for working people in 1884; Helen Hunt Jackson confronted the treatment of American Indians in 1885; John Muir defended the Yosemite Valley from the timber industry in 1890; Jacob Riis recorded tenement poverty in How the Other Half Lives in 1890; and Ida B. Wells exposed the South’s causal lynching practices in 1892.

The muckrakers of the new century revealed Standard Oil’s bullying ways, political corruption in cities, the states, and the U.S. Capitol; patent-medicine and insurance swindles; unhealthful food; the sale of convicts to contractors; and more. In later decades, the communist press — yes, the communist press — alerted readers to the perils of silicosis and campaigned against color-line in Major League Baseball. The photographs of Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s and Margaret Bourke-White for Life magazine in the 1930s and 1940s provided a window on poverty.

From the end of World War II until the civil rights movement began its ascension, the partisan and activist journalism faded but didn’t disappear, its practice crimped perhaps by the so-called “Great Consensus” that had evolved, as Daly wrote in Covering America. Part of its demise can be attributed to changing social attitudes. To write against segregation in the 1950s marked you in many corners as a disruptive partisan or activist, not a journalist; by the time the civil rights protests became a TV miniseries, to write in support of segregation made you suspect; after the March on Washington in 1963, support of full citizenship for African-Americans was the default mode for the mainstream press. In other words, the once-radical became the norm, and after it did, those who criticized American apartheid in the approved language were no longer marginalized as activist or partisan journalists.