05E08 - Harriet's Happenings

Sterling Murdoch arrives in Walnut Grove planning to found a newspaper. The fledgling newspaper is The Pen and the Plow, and its star reporter is none other than one Harriet Olesen. At first, everyone including the Ingalls welcome the newspaper, but the completely inaccurate content of the "Harriet's Happenings" column soon has some people losing their enthusiasm. Nels reminds his wife that a reporter's job is to be accurate, but Mrs. Olesen suggests she's merely "reporting the fact that they are rumors"; he is even more frustrated when she suggests holding an unethical sale at the store. Later, Nellie loses a spot in the county's spelling bee to Erich Schiller, the son of German immigrants and outstanding student in his class. Mrs. Olesen is outraged and in her next column, writes a story suggesting that Erich's parents are illiterate. Erich is deeply upset by the story and it causes him to perform badly at the county spelling bee; he even drops out of school. With some help from Charles, Mr. Schiller tells Erich that he is proud of his son and has a great future ahead of him; this is enough to get him to come back to school. Charles is unable to make headway with Murdoch about his newspaper, since Murdoch reasons that people like reading their names in print and it means more advertising and money. Laura and Albert get some revenge when they switch the printing plates and publish some unflattering stories about Nellie and Mrs. Olesen, and an ad that suggests a 100 percent-off sale at the Mercantile. When Caroline refuses to punish Laura and Albert over their trick, Mrs. Olesen responds by publishing a story stating that Charles fathered Albert outside his marriage (along with another item that suggests that the Garveys are heavily in debt). An angry Charles has enough and, at church on Sunday, exposes "The Pen and the Plow" as yellow journalism, and that everyone else shares in the blame for reading the paper even though they knew the stories were clearly untrue. It isn't long before the newspaper is forced to stop publishing and Murdoch is driven from town. In the close, Laura tells how she hoped that someday, Walnut Grove would get a legitimate newspaper.