George Seldes

'The real inside news, the kind newspapers frequently get but dare not print -- Mr. Seldes delighted in uncovering stories that had been overlooked by others, exposing corruption and challenging the practices of leading newspapers." -- New York Times. "George Seldes, the inventor of modern investigative reporting, led the sort of swashbuckling life that Hollywood might have scripted for a foreign correspondent and rebel reporter. He interviewed Lenin, Trotsky, Freud, Einstein, and Hitler. He filed dispatches from behind the lines during World War I and covered the Spanish Civil War with his wife, Helen. He was booted out of the Soviet Union in 1923 and fled Italy two years later fearing for his life, after implicating Benito Mussolini in a murder. Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Sinclair Lewis were among his drinking buddies. Yet the glamour of journalistic success never blinded him to serious shortcomings in the American press." -- Utne Reader. Seldes was the least-known of America's three great muckrakers..
George Seldes (1890-1995) worked as Berlin, Rome, Dublin, Moscow and Baghdad correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 to 1929, but quit the mainstream media over censorship of his reports. He became an independent journalist, getting the true story out in his first two books, You Can’t Print That! and Can These Things Be! In 1940 he started In Fact, a weekly newsletter of investigative reporting and criticism of the press, with a top circulation of 176,000. He uncovered big stories like major corporations trading with the enemy, and the link between smoking and cancer -- to be hushed up for another 20 years by mainstream media hooked on cigarette ads. In Fact was shut down in 1950 by an FBI witch hunt against subscribers. Third World Traveler page.  Holhut biography.   The London Independent obituary.   Utne Reader Bio.   Erbzine bio.   Tell the Truth and Run, award-winning George Seldes documentary. Wiki