In 1887 Nellie Bly, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, had herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island under the name Nellie Brown. She fooled a judge, a police officer and doctors at Bellevue Hospital into believing she was insane, then spent ten days inside. She found patients given insufficient clothing, poor food and brutal nurses, and some had been sent there by relatives or were ill in body rather than mind. Her reports ran as a two-part illustrated series and were later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House. The city increased funding for public charities and set aside $50,000 for the asylum, which closed seven years later. Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, pioneered undercover investigative reporting that became a model for the muckraking era.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.