Week 12- Investigative Journalism

I was really looking forward to this lecture. One of my favourite books is All The President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their investigations into the Watergate affair. The book, and subsequent film, were one of the reasons I decided to pursue journalism. I had always wondered why there seemed to be a special lustre attached to 'investigative journalism'. Surely all journalism is investigative in some way. Funnily enough the first quote we were shown, by Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart, seemed to address this. "Isn't all journalism meant to involve questioning investigation of facts and opinions presented to us?" The acrostic list of 'In's was quite useful; intelligent, informed intuitive, inside and invest. This led into four deeper definitions. The need to be critical and thorough, expose corruption etc, to be the voice for the voiceless and to keep a check on the government and other organisations etc. This is particularly true in QLD at the moment with a large LNP majority and no Senate.

There was a link back to the past lectures when we touched on the need to cut through the agenda. Public Media, in this case ABC, "cannot simply report; its legislation clearly implies that it should also work within the best traditions of investigative journalism."

We looked at five examples of investigative journalism such as Edward Smith Hall, who in 1826 published the first edition of The Sydney Monitor, which among other topics, exposed oppression of convicts, morality issues among officers and the Government. The second example was The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, an investigation into child prostitution in Victorian London in the 1880's by the editor of Pall Mall Gazette W.T. Stead. The third example was the aforementioned Watergate affair. We looked at the investigative work by journalists such as Chris Masters, Phil Dickie and Shaun Hoyt that ultimately bought down the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government in QLD. I recently read Last Drinks by Andrew McGahan, which is a non-autobiographical fiction work based on the investigations. Finally, the work of Wikileaks and Julian Assange was shown, although we were told Wikileaks isn't journalism because they have a lot of information but it takes journalists to sort through it and find the story.

A key quality of investigative journalism is skepticism and the urge to never assume facts. Investigative journalists will use interviews, observations, documents, briefings, leaks, trespass (do you go over the fence?) and theft (perhaps not quite as prevalent as it used to be).

With the rise of PR and the 24 hour news cycle, threats have emerged to investigative journalism. Less money=less time and journalists= less investigative journalists. PR, notorious for spin, presents a selective use of facts, it is a journalists job to question and investigate these facts and views. I had watched this video with Bob Woodward earlier on in the semester when I was doing research for one of my first blogs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVKGUctuoXE. I look forward to the Journalistic Investigation subject next semester.