W12 Lecture: Investigative Journalism

Most good journalism is investigative, or Shoe Leather Journalism. Investigation in journalism is about discovering truths and deviations from the truth. It should be intelligent (know your purpose and be prepare yourself to encounter troubles), informed (if you are not informed about the basic aspects and facts, you can miss the true story), intuitive (explore your hunches), inside (try to get exclusive information-to do this, the interviewee must be able to trust you), involved (invest your time and effort to be thorough) and interactive (interview, observe, research, watch for leaks, briefings and documents).

Good investigative journalism should be the critical and thorough. Wherever possible, it should provide civic voice to the voiceless, therein becoming the "custodians of conscience" and enablers of social justice-exposing society to itself . By doing this, investigative journalism may hold those with power to account as "the Fourth Estate". This Fourth Estate allows freedom of information so that democracy functions properly. It keeps 'the man'-the government, legislation, the judges/ judiciary and the police etc. on their toes, so they don't get away with injustices against the people by abusing their power.

Bruce gave some famous examples of when investigative journalism and the media have exposed the powerful to bring about justice, including "the Moonlight State", Wikileaks, the Watergate Scandal (the investigations prior to the Frost and Nixon interviews) and the Fitzgerald Enquiry. *There have really been many more instances of this, I think. I mean, any time there is ever a scandal in Parliament, it is always the media who have uncovered it, or at least helped in making it known the the public. As you could expect, the powers being exposed for wrong doing generally try to weasel their way out of the blame *cough cough* Craig Thomson acting as if his Union credit card paid for those prostitutes itself: yeah right! Because of the nature of Australia's governmental and judicial systems, thankfully Thomson is probably not going to get away with his offences. This is not the case in other countries though, where the level of corruption is so high and freedom of speech and press is so severely suppressed that the powerful offenders do get away with their crimes. Not only that, but if the journalists actually manage to expose the things the powerful don't want in the public sphere, the 'messengers' may be literally shot, or worse. It all depends on how corrupt the government and the military etc. are, and how much control they have.

Triangulation of whether what you have been told, what you have seen and what was recorded match up can be a rule for checking the validity of your story. Investigative journalists should take a sceptical-not cynical-approach to the information they discover. A current goal for them should be to improve the quality of their stories, and not follow the trend of churnalism, by being thorough and reliable, checking their sources and doing vast amounts of research. Some advice to keep in mind when compiling an investigative story: check your facts, assume nothing, expect whistle blowers to go and BE crazy. *Investigative journalism can change society and the world...Or maybe that's just because a couple of superheros work for the media?

Some good investigative journalism programs are Australian Story, the 7:30 Report, Four Corners and Hungry Beast. *Hungry Beast was a really accessible, intelligent, interesting and entertaining program, advertised as "Youth Orientated Investigative Journalism", but it's a bit unconventional and offensive at times. Here's a link to a review on it and my encourage it to watch it, it's a great show.
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/hungry-beast-youth-oriented-investigative-journalism-abc-tv-review/

 -Bon