Investigative Journalism

Hugo de Burgh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415441445, 9780415441438
• eBook ISBN: 9781134068708
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Praise for the first edition:

'A surprising book. I'm surprised that it hasn't been done before, and I'd also be surprised if anyone did it better.' – Roger Cook, The Cook Report, Central Television

'A book that no aspiring student of the subject can do without.' – Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

Investigative journalism has helped bring down governments, imprison politicians, trigger legislation, reveal miscarriages of justice and shame corporations. Even today, when much of the media colludes with power and when viciousness and sensationalism are staples of formerly high-minded media, investigative journalists can stand up for the powerless, the exploited, the truth.

Investigative Journalism provides an unrivalled introduction to this vital part of our social life: its origins, the men and women who established its norms and its achievements in the last decades. Two chapters describe the relationships with the law, bringing us up to date, and others deal with the professional techniques, the sociology and the teaching of investigative journalism. A further new chapter examines the influence of the blogosphere on investigative journalism.

The case studies of the first edition have been supplemented by new chapters: the investigators and methods which revealed the subcontracting of the torture of Iraqi prisoners; how the murder of Stephen Lawrence was treated in the Daily Mail; the tabloids and their investigations; BBC Panorama.

Part I
CONTEXT

1
INTRODUCTION

Hugo de Burgh

In the first edition of this book there was enthusiasm about investigative journalism: as a distinct genre of journalism; as a vital means of accountability, almost the fourth estate itself; as the first rough draft of legislation. Then, it was widely thought that investigative journalism was a valuable public service endangered by new technology and crass management. Now, when every medium trumpets its work as investigative journalism, it is often written off as just another squalid trick up the sleeves of money-grubbing media moguls. Fashions change.

Although I do not buy the characterisation of the media as the enemy of all decent society, a debate which I introduce in Chapter 4, I am less confident of the idealism expressed in the first edition. In the United Kingdom we have lived through ten years of an experiment in government by spin, in which wars have been waged, the constitution subverted, public services distorted and civil servants corrupted in the cause of feeding the media in the hope that they can thus be diverted from attacking politicians. The techniques of investigative journalism, it is now more clearly seen, can be put to partisan, commercial or corrupt use as much as to right wrongs or overcome evil. That this happens in many different countries today was becoming evident to me as I assembled the international essays that went into Making Journalists: Diverse Models, Global Issues (Routledge, 2005).

Nevertheless investigative journalism still has the potential to make a worthwhile contribution to society, as the recent examples cited in the pages below show us. It does so by drawing attention to failures within society’s systems of regulation and to the ways in which those systems can be circumvented by the rich, the powerful and the corrupt.

The motives may be various, the limitations obvious, yet the tasks still need to be done. And how and why they are done is increasingly discussed and studied in universities and colleges all over the world, where the first edition of this book, translated into many languages, has for eight years provided the only available introduction to the phenomenon in Britain. This second edition keeps many of the previous case studies but replaces all of the original part 1, except for the history chapters (2 and 3). The examples are still relevant, although change is accelerating such that it looks as if a further edition, in say 2015, will start afresh. For the moment, I have added several new case studies, described below.

For whom is this book?

Although we hope that it will have wide appeal, our work is written with media studies students in mind. For them, investigative journalism is one genre of journalism; hence we seek to place it in context, to see how investigative journalism is seen by its practitioners and how it may appear within the wider contexts of public affairs and the study of the media. It is not a ‘how to’ book.

By contrast, we aim to provide an introduction to the subject for students who need to understand it as an influential social phenomenon, whether or not they ever practice journalism. While several of the writers of this book teach vocational journalism courses, they believe that student journalists should not merely absorb professional conventions without understanding their limitations; equally they hope that media studies students will ground their analyses in knowledge of what media people actually do, how they do it and what influences bear down upon them as they do it. This book will also, we believe, be useful to students of disciplines other than media studies for whom some background knowledge of investigative journalism is needed. It assumes little prior knowledge. We have attempted to write it in such a manner that students from other Anglophone countries, and from other European countries, will follow the cases cited and be able to relate what is discussed to their own situations, and this may account for some explanatory remarks which would be otiose for an English audience.

How this book is organised

In this chapter, after explaining the book, I attempt a definition of investigative journalism that can be useful at least for the duration of the read. Through it, and within other chapters too, you will find references to established incidents in the recent life of investigative journalism that illuminate different aspects in different ways. These include the ‘Thalidomide’, ‘William Straw’, ‘The Connection’, ‘Goodwin’, ‘The Committee’, ‘Lawrence’, ‘Gilligan’ and ‘Rendition’ stories.

With Chapter 2 we go to history, with an attempt to show how, gradually, the figure of the investigative journalist emerged. Behind this is the belief that a failure to see journalism as the product of particular historical circumstances, which men and women have the power to influence, condemns us to accepting the common-sense notion that journalistic freedoms have come to stay because they are a free gift provided with modernity. It is easy for Britons or North Americans to fall into this error, but German, Italian or Polish journalists would be unlikely to do so, given the way journalism lost hard-won rights in the last century when totalitarian socialist regimes came to power. There are other lessons of immediate relevance to be taken from history; the undermining of the radical press by mass advertising earlier this century, as analysed by Curran and Seaton (2005), has its echoes and its equivalents today.

Although technology and political economy change dramatically, cultural responses to new circumstances have an eerie familiarity. Once you have read this book you will be familiar with the names of some individual journalists and can decide for yourself whether Pilger is our Cobbett; whether Murdoch, the media prince we love to hate, is the Harmsworth, and Whittam Smith the Renaudot of our era; perhaps England’s Paul Foot, in his radical instincts and reasoned research, was the Ida Tarbell of the twentieth century. What cultural stereotype does Gilligan represent? Was he not in the same tradition, in that famous 2003 radio broadcast, as Winston Churchill writing in the Daily Mirror of the 1930s? Both were pointing up the dangerous deficiencies of our political masters and drawing upon sources and techniques that contemporaries thought reprehensible. It may be that cultural context is here at play, more enduring than economic determinists would have us believe.

Chapter 3 looks at recent investigative journalism. Yet journalism, even investigative journalism, is ephemeral. How can you make interesting revelations of misconduct or the uncovering of crookery that excited people in 1972? By demonstrating that the act of investigation had bearing upon wider social developments that still impinge upon our lives, by evoking historical empathy, by using them as case studies for skills and techniques or by offering them as examples to emulate or avoid.

The task of selecting specimens and of providing some orderly account of investigative journalism is made more difficult by the shortage of preliminary studies. True, journalists write up their cases into books, and they write memoirs, such as Andrew Marr’s My Trade (2005); there are books on wide questions of journalism’s impact upon society. There are a few books like More Rough Justice by Peter Hill and his colleagues (1985) that look at genres or journalistic phenomena, yet analyses of investigative journalism hardly exist.

A new Chapter 4 brings the story up to date; in 2000 we were much exercised by the apparent need for journalism, in a democracy, to function as the opposition. We were also debating the ‘journalism of attachment’. More recently the issue has been whether the media are damaging to democracy, or whether it is our politicians that are at fault. Chapter 4 looks at these matters and also provides an overview of investigative journalism in the period, which will give context to the later case study chapters, although the connection between the political debates and the stuff of investigative journalism seems tenuous, unless the increasing boldness and brazenness of investigative journalism is to be interpreted as a function of the decline of the authority of politicians and institutions.

Perhaps the biggest change in the environment for journalism to take place in the period is in the way the internet and mobile phones are now used. ‘On the day of the July 2005 London tube bombings the BBC received 22,000 emails and text messages about the bombings and 300 photos, of which 50 were within an hour of the first bomb going off, and several video sequences.’¹ The implications of participatory journalism are dealt with in Paul Bradshaw’s Chapter 5, which looks at the relationship between investigative journalism and blogs, beginning with a brief history of the technology and its journalistic uses, before exploring three areas where blogs have become important tools in investigative journalism: in sourcing material; in disseminating the results of fieldwork; and as a source of funding. He proposes that blogs provide an opportunity to revitalise journalism. He looks at the amateur—professional debate; regular monitoring of blogs as leads and sources including sector expertise; Crowdsourcing; Journalistic Transparency; Gatewatching; Fundraising; and the new ethical issues raised by new newsgathering techniques.

American and British journalism share historical and cultural origins and yet display differences that illuminate both. The most significant differences are in the legal and political framework within which journalists operate. Horrie’s first chapter explains how the law shapes both the methods employed and editorial agenda pursued by investigative journalists and their publishers. He deals with the key concepts of public interest, its relationship to sourcing and privacy, and qualified privilege, whereby investigative journalists can use persuasive and accurate, but legally inadmissible evidence, subject to a number of conditions. In recent years a number of cases have clarified these matters as well as endorsed the specifically investigative role of the press in initiating stories, in addition to the less controversial role of public ‘watchdog’ and the 10-point test for standards of ‘quality journalism’.

Horrie’s second, short, chapter deals with Freedom of Information in Britain and the uses to which it has been put since a 2000 Act ostensibly handed important opportunities to journalists.

The law is only one way in which investigative journalism is framed; another influence is professional practice. Gavin MacFadyen’s The practices of investigate journalism is a very clear exposition of the techniques and practices that constitute Investigative Journalism, with illustrations. He covers the main elements, reporting, whistle blowing and protection of sources, researching (which he calls ‘digging’), establishing proof and self protection in the age of very sophisticated surveillance. Britain is possibly the best country in which to base such a discussion, since the standards of required proof and the fear of prosecution are considerably greater than in many other countries, because of the severity of UK libel law.

As the title suggests, Hanna’s Universities as evangelists of the watchdog role: teaching investigative journalism to undergraduates not only describes some of the practicalities of teaching investigative journalism, but alerts us to the role that universities now play in the media. The paucity of industry training programmes and the willingness of the media to take on younger journalism staff mean that the universities have become the main vehicles for the teaching of journalism skills and the transmission of public service values.

Journalists tend to see themselves as free agents. The media studies approach is an essential corrective to this and Michael Bromley’s Investigative journalism and scholarship looks at the ways in which investigative journalism has been understood and interpreted. He starts with a workaday illustration of the different views of journalists, moralising their profession as a public service essential to the just running of society, and the media businessman. The businessman judges journalism by audience appeal, stop. Reading the pontificating defences of investigative journalism that Bromley shares with us, we shouldn’t forget that the revival of the genre in recent years in many countries has been just as much about money-making and democratisation as about social responsibility. More people participating in the public sphere in Latin America and China, for example, means bigger audiences for current affairs and therefore competition by newspapers to satisfy them, often with what is cheerfully labelled ‘investigative journalism’. When much of it is manifestly neither properly researched nor much more than sensationalism, the public’s disenchantment with the journalists, and mistrust of their public service pretensions, is not surprising.

Bromley brings up other issues, such as the paradox of digitalisation at once giving more opportunities to government to avoid or traduce journalists, and at the same time providing us with ‘we media’, in which heretofore passive consumers now originate or modify material online and compete for attention with commercial media. He touche...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Context
• PART II Cases