Investigative journalism is a form ofjournalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single or few topics of interest, such as hidden problems & truths, serious crimes, education,racial injustice,corruption &abuse of power,child protection, social welfare, homelessness or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".
Most investigative journalism has traditionally been conducted by newspapers,wire services, andfreelance journalists. With the decline in income through advertising, many traditional news services have struggled to fund investigative journalism, due to it being very time-consuming and expensive. Journalistic investigations are increasingly carried out by news organizations working together, even internationally (as in the case of thePanama Papers,Paradise Papers andPandora Papers), or bynonprofit outlets such asProPublica, which rely on the support of the public and benefactors to fund their work.
University of Missouri journalism professor Steve Weinberg defined investigative journalism as: "Reporting, through one's own initiative and work product, matters of importance to readers, viewers, or listeners."[1] In many cases, the subjects of the reporting wish the matters under scrutiny to remain undisclosed. There are currently university departments for teaching investigative journalism. Conferences are conducted presenting peer-reviewed research into investigative journalism.[2]
British media theoristHugo de Burgh (2000) states: "An investigative journalist is a man or woman whose profession is to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available. The act of doing this generally is called investigative journalism and is distinct from apparently similar work done by police, lawyers, auditors, and regulatory bodies in that it is not limited as to target, not legally founded and closely connected to publicity."[3]
Early newspapers in British colonial America were often suppressed by the authorities for their investigative journalism. Examples includePublick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick and Benjamin Franklin'sNew England Courant. Journalists who reported on the doings of the British authorities would later contribute to revolutionary sentiment in the run-up to theAmerican Revolution; one prominent example was theBoston Gazette, contributed to bySamuel Adams among others.[4]
American journalism textbooks point out thatmuckraking standards promoted byMcClure's Magazine around 1902, "Have become integral to the character of modern investigative journalism."[5] Furthermore, the successes of the early muckrakers continued to inspire journalists.[6][7]
The growth ofmedia conglomerates in the U.S. since the 1980s has been accompanied by massive cuts in the budgets for investigative journalism. A 2002 study concluded "that investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the nation's commercial airwaves."[8]
Worker-owned[9] andnonprofit journalism have worked to address the resulting need for in-depth investigations and reporting. One of the largest teams of investigative journalists is the Washington-basedInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) launched in 1997 by theCenter for Public Integrity[10] which includes 165 investigative reporters in over 65 countries[11] working collaboratively on crime, corruption, and abuse of power at a global level,[11] underGerard Ryle as Director.[12] Working with major media outlets globally, they have exposed organised crime, international tobacco companies, private military cartels, asbestos companies, climate change lobbyists, details of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts, and most recently thePanama Papers[11] andParadise Papers.[13][14][15]
Other associations of investigative journalism outlets include theInstitute for Nonprofit News, and the Association of Nonprofit News Organizations.[17]
An investigative reporter may make use of one or more of these tools, among others, on a single story:
Analysis of documents, such aslawsuits and otherlegal documents, tax records, government reports, regulatory reports, and corporate financial filings.[18]
Ida B. Wells-Barnett's 1892 pamphletSouthern Horrors documented lynching in the United States, exposing in the pages of black-owned newspapers as a campaign of oppression and intimidation against African Americans. A white mob destroyed her newspaper press and office in retaliation for her reporting.[21]
Nellie Bly, a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman in the late 19th century, famously feigned insanity as part of her 1887undercover investigation into and subsequent exposé regarding the inner-workings of theWomen's Lunatic Asylum in New York City. Published to wide acclaim as a series of articles in theNew York World which were later compiled and further detailed in her bookTen Days in a Mad-House, Bly's revelations led to both a grand jury investigation of the asylum and increased funding for the Department of Public Charities and Corrections.[23]
Between 1972 and 1974 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered and exposed a variety of incriminating information regarding President Richard Nixon's 1968–1972 presidential campaign. The information exposed, prompted Nixon's resignation in 1974 and was then on recognized as theWatergate scandal.[24]
John M. Crewdson of theChicago Tribune wrote a 1996 article[30] proposing the installment ofdefibrillators on American airliners. Crewdson argued that based on his research and analysis, "Medical kits and defibrillators would be economically justified if they saved just 3 lives each year." Soon after the article's publication, airlines began installing defibrillators on planes, and the devices began to show up in airports and other public spaces. Ten years after installing defibrillators,American Airlines reported that 80 lives had been saved by the machines.[31]
Hopewell Chin'ono, the award-winning Zimbabwean journalist who investigated and exposed the Covid-gate scandal in Zimbabwe in June 2020. US$60 million was siphoned to a shadowy company called Drax that is linked to PresidentEmmerson Mnangagwa. The exposure resulted in the dismissal and arrest of Health Minister Obbidiah Moyo. Hopewell Chin'ono was arrested on flimsy charges in an apparent attempt to silence him.[32]
This section needs to beupdated. The reason given is: Add some more recent sources than 2010. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(March 2024)
Harber, Anton; Renn, Margaret, eds. (2010).Troublemakers: The Best of South Africa's Investigative Journalism. Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media.ISBN978-1-77009-893-0.OCLC794905854.
Video of the 2010 Logan Symposium atUniversity of California Berkeley's"Consequences of Investigative Reporting" panel, in which reporters from theSahara Reporters, theMedill Innocence Project atNorthwestern,The Washington Post,The Las Vegas Review-Journal, andThe El Paso Times talk about the dangers investigative reporters face; their experiences range from threat to life and limb for reporting on corruption in Africa, to subpoenas aimed at a journalism professor and his students for attempting to bring to light a miscarriage of justice; a Pulitzer Prize winner describes reporting on national security as her sources face internal inquisitions; a veteran reporter in Las Vegas talks about taking on casino moguls and organized crime; while a reporter covering the Mexican border explains how she has survived the violent reality of the undeclared war on our border, April 2010
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