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During the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's first three years of life, the bellicose spirit of Joseph Pulitzer, its proprietor, generated 17 libel suits. Pulitzer, who paid a paltry total of $50 in damages, considered the sum a more than reasonable price for the privilege of leading his paper into battle wherever a good cause needed a champion. Pulitzer was fortunate, too, in his choice of generals. As city editor and later managing editor, from 1900 to 1938 the legendary O.K. Bovard cemented the paper's reputation as U.S. journalism's most dauntless crusader. It was the Post-Dispatch that in the 1920s ran to ground the infamous Birger Gang. The Post-Dispatch removed the lid from Washington's unsavory Teapot Dome scandal in 1922; in the 1950s it exposed corruption in the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue—and reaped the satisfaction of seeing James P. Finnegan, the bureau's collector in St. Louis, sent to prison. In 1947, suspicious St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters stayed on the Centralia, Ill., mine disaster story after the last victim had been buried and everyone else had gone home. Their vigilance produced a dramatic series proving that Illinois mine owners had neglected safety conditions in order to meet payoffs to the state department of mines. The paper's present publisher, Joseph Pulitzer III, is not the aggressive journalist his grandfather was, nor does his paper spoil so often now for a rousing good scrap. But its foreign coverage still ranks among the best, and Managing Editor Arthur Bertelson says that the Post-Dispatch is such a "well-oiled machine it can operate almost on its own impetus."
The Washington Post
We try to reach the lady's maid as well as the lady.
—Editor James Russell Wiggins
Circulation 422,000 mornings. 510,000 Sundays. Independent by declaration, but Democrat in practice. By policy, does not endorse presidential candidates, has done so only once since 1932: in 1952, it supported Eisenhower.