Hey readers,

A few days ago, fellow Future Perfect writer Kelsey Piper and I were on a panel for a series of talks on high-impact careers in public policy. Specifically, we were there to talk about how journalists can have an impact on policy.

There are strong norms in the US, at least since World War II, that news coverage is meant to be objective and impartial. When I say things like “I wanted my writing to persuade Congress to expand the Child Tax Credit, and I took it as a win when they did,” people with more traditional views of the role of journalism sometimes look askance.

But this audience wasn’t like that. They had a more foundational question: Does journalism actually influence policy?

As a journalist who very explicitly hopes to have a policy influence through his work, I have an obvious bias (my answer: yes).

But it’s a complicated question and teasing out the cause and effect is difficult. Most significant public policies are the result of years of lobbying, legislative wrangling, public relations battles, and favor-trading. It seems plausible that the writing of pro-war journalists like Judith Miller and Jeff Goldberg contributed to the outbreak of the Iraq War — but if they hadn’t written what they did, would the US have invaded anyway?

It’s impossible to say for sure. We don’t have access to that counterfactual.

But it’s a question worth wrestling with, and I wanted to use this newsletter to highlight a couple of cases where I think it’s clear that journalists did make a profound difference on public policy through persuasion alone, which — in my mind — squarely puts journalism in the realm of potentially high-impact work.

How a book started the war on poverty

LBJ’s War on Poverty, by Johnson’s own telling, grew out of John F. Kennedy’s interest in the issue prior to his assassination. And Kennedy’s interest grew out of the work of two journalists: Michael Harrington and Dwight MacDonald.

Harrington was not primarily a journalist; he was an activist by trade, first as a part of the progressive Catholic Worker movement and then as a democratic socialist (and, indeed, the key founder of Democratic Socialists of America).

But his 1962 book The Other America is a work of journalism, and in substantial measure a work of data journalism.

Part of Harrington’s contribution was using census data to estimate the share of Americans earning less than $3,000 a year in 1960 ($27,119.50 today), his chosen poverty line. His finding: one in four Americans were in poverty by this metric, due to utter neglect from the middle and upper classes.

The book, Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman would later note, was written with those classes as its intended audience. And thanks in part to a long, even more passionate review of the book by MacDonald in the New Yorker, its ideas made their way to John F. Kennedy in the White House.

"The significant role in helping the President see the larger dimensions of poverty and resulting in its becoming a political issue rests with one individual book — that by Michael Harrington," the political scientist Byron Lander wrote in 1971, after compiling testimonies from Kennedy aides.

One journalist’s impact on the cost of health care

Another, much more recent example of this kind of persuasion also involves the New Yorker (let’s hope for the sake of us non-New Yorker writers that this trend generalizes).

In 2009, physician-journalist Atul Gawande wrote "The Cost Conundrum," a piece about the stunningly high cost of health care in McAllen, Texas. The city was not particularly expensive to live and work in, but had the second-highest health care costs in the country.

The core of the problem, Gawande wrote, was that McAllen residents got too much health care in the way of unnecessary tests, prescriptions, and surgery.

Not long after the piece ran, then-President Barack Obama held a meeting with two dozen Democratic senators about their planned health care reform legislation — and brought up the Gawande article repeatedly.

"He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the New York Times. "He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’"

The fascinating part is that they did fix it — at least in McAllen. Years later Gawande returned to McAllen, and found that McAllen's health care costs "dropped almost three thousand dollars per Medicare recipient … the total savings to taxpayers to have reached almost half a billion dollars by the end of 2014."

The causes behind this fall are varied, but one component was Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a new model of medical practice created by Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Part of what’s interesting to me about these cases is that they’re instances of pure persuasion: Yes, they reached presidents already inclined to listen, but the articles and books had impact directly because of their arguments.

Sometimes you make an argument, and someone in a position to change things is on the other end hearing it. If that happens to you even once in your life, it can make for a pretty profound impact as a journalist.

—Dylan Matthews, @dylanmatt