Week 12: Investigative Journalism

Another week, another great lecture.

This week we discussed investigative journalism. I particularly liked the quote by Lord Northcliffe:

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress, all the rest is advertising."

Firstly, we talked about the ‘in’s of investigative journalism:

-       intelligent

-       informed

-       intuitive

-       inside

-       invest

I agreed with all of these except with ‘inside’ which Dr. Redman pointed out could almost be considered synonymous with ‘intimate’. This implies that the subject or the source needs to trust you. However, I thought it would be somewhat questionable to get someone to trust you and then potentially destroy that trust depending on the spin the article has. I particularly agreed with ‘invest’ since investigative journalism seems to be something that one would have to put a lot of time and effort into as well as resources. My belief was confirmed in the next slide when we were told that a deeper definition of investigative journalism included “critical and thorough journalism”, with thorough meaning that the journalism makes a substantial effort regarding the time spent, sources consulted and thorough approach needed.

Another point that I found intriguing was the one of the key purposes of investigative journalism is: ‘to provide a voice for those without one and to hold the powerful to account’ by the Centre for Investigation Journalism (City University London).  However, I felt that this lacked an essential aspect ‘to hold the powerful accountable for the voice that they have’. I think that investigative journalism must ensure that the powerful are held accountable for all the luxuries that they enjoy including an influential voice that can impact greatly on people who do not share the same privileges.

One point that definitely made me think was that Dr. Redman put ‘sceptical not cynical’ on the slide about the key aspects of investigative journalism. I think this is a good point because there is a fine line between the two and I believe it would be easy to succumb to being overly cynical after spending too much time working with investigative journalism.

I also thoroughly enjoyed learning about the ‘trailblazers’ because it gave me a fresh wave of inspiration to stick to journalism because of how important it was, is and can be J

On a side note: We watched a documentary in the tutorial this week and whilst we agreed that Wikileaks is not really journalism since it is more of an information dump, which provides the information for journalists to ‘pick through’ according to Dr. Redman, in the documentary Julian Assange claimed that he does associate himself with the term ‘journalist’ but more so with the term ‘activist’. So that really gave me something to think about, and although I am naturally partial to Dr. Redman’s argument since he is my lecturer, I think he is right.