Investigative Journalism / Investigative Reporting

a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing in many cases, the subjects of the reporting wish the matters under scrutiny to remain undisclosed often called also watchdog journalism or accountability reporting

Professional Definitions

An investigative journalist is a man or woman whose profession it 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 .
Hugo de Burgh, British media theorist (2000)

Professional Definitions
Reporting,

through one's own initiative and work product, matters of importance to readers, viewers or listeners.

Steve Weinberg, professor of journalism, University of Missouri

The politician-journalist relation

The politician always try to offer as much information to the journalist as he can, because the journalist is connecting him to his voters The journalist also try to have a good relationship with the politician, his main source of information On the other hand: there are always information that the politician wants to keep secret/undisclosed And there are journalists who are chasing exactly this type of information; they are called investigative reporters

The Fourth Power

As an exponent of the fourth power (controlling the three other powers: legislative, executive, and judicial), the journalist presumes that the undisclosed information points towards a breaking of the law or of the ethical rules Investigative journalist is going primordially after the corruption cases of political, business, and financial elites These are affairs involving abuse of power, or cases when public funds go to private pockets The people involved are trying to hide such information by classifying the documents as being business, state, or bank secrets classified documents

Classified Documents

When a journalist finds such documents, he/she have to carefully consider what is more important:
to to

respect the confidentiality of the revealed information, or take into consideration the general public interest, and to expose it

Journalism of Outrage

1690-1972 : muckrakers / revealing journalism 1972-1974 : The Watergate Scandal From 1974 (1977) on: investigative reporting

1914-1920 First World War 1939-1945 Second World War 1948-1989 Cold War

Watchdogs and Muckrakers: Revealing Journalism as public policy

Agenda-setting Theory: media do not/can not tell people what to think; but tell them what to think about!

Journalists reveals wrongdoings and motivate the public to think about them. From this point is up to the public to demand reforms from the government. Reporters see their goals as informing the public about wrongdoings, but not directly asking them to demand reforms. Under this perspective, the efforts of journalism may not lead to big changes in policy agendas.

Watchdogs and Muckrakers: Revealing Journalism as public policy

Agenda-building Theory: media, government, and citizenry reciprocally influence one another

Agenda building role of the media is seen as a collective proces, in which reporters make certain issues more salient to the media, the public, and policy makers. Reporters basic goal is to stimulate agenda-building process in order to create reformist outcomes policy changes that promote democracy, efficiency, or social justice.

Muckrakers
The

first journalists who revealed political misconduct

They believed that exposure of ills and wrongdoings lead to cures and remedies They saw their primary goal as to correct problems and to make profound impact in public policies

Theodore Roosevelt on muckraking

President Theodore (Teddy)

Roosevelt (1858-1919), the 26th president of the US was one of the first people who accused muckrakers with misleading the public and being troublemakers, not community builders. Others claimed that muckrakers do not have the ethic of caring people, and are harmful to the society. Proponents have argued that by revealing wrongdoings, muckraking serves to the American ideal of popular democracy.

Muckraker = reform-minded journalist

Origin of the term Teddy Roosevelt, 1906 speech delivered on the occasion of dedicating the U.S. House of Representatives office building :

There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

Muckraker = reform-minded journalist

Roosevelt, on a character from John Bunyans 1678 classic, Pilgrims Progress, said on the same occasion:

... you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.

The muckrakers themselves proudly adopted the label.

Consequences of muckraking

In his book, The Era of the Muckrakers (1933), C. C. Regier argued that it is possible to tabulate the achievements of revealing journalism during this period:
"The list of reforms accomplished between 1900 and 1915 is an impressive one. The convict and peonage systems were destroyed in some states; prison reforms were undertaken; a federal pure food act was passed in 1906; child labor laws were adopted by many states; a federal employers' liability act was passed in 1906, and a second one in 1908, which was amended in 1910; forest reserves were set aside; the Newlands Act of 1902 made reclamation of millions of acres of land possible; a policy of the conservation of natural resources was followed; eight-hour laws for women were passed in some states; race-track gambling was prohibited; twenty states passed mothers' pension acts between 1908 and 1913; twenty-five states had workmen's compensation laws in 1915; an income tax amendment was added to the Constitution; the Standard Oil and the Tobacco companies were dissolved; Niagara Falls was saved from the greed of corporations; Alaska was saved from the Guggenheims and other capitalists; and better insurance laws and packing-house laws were placed on the statute books."

First colonial muckraker

Benjamin Harris publisher of the first public newspaper, Publick Occurences Both Forreign and Domestick, on September 5, 1690, in Boston
Harris portrayed the torture of French prisoners by Indians who were allies of the British Army Four days later, British authorities suspended Harris printing license, before he published the second issue The paper was a great piece: highlighted specific evidence of misconduct; questioned the established public policy; left one page blank for readers opinions and comments

Famous muckrakers
Famous Muckrakers and their Works

Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885), U. S. policy regarding Indians)

A Century of Dishonor (attacked

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Shame of the Cities (attacked political corruption)

Famous muckrakers
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), The Jungle (attacked the meat-packing industry)

Frank Norris (1870-1902), The Octopus (attacked the railroad industry)

Famous muckrakers
Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-1944), a series of exposs in Ladies Home Journal (attacked Standard Oil)

John Spargo (1876-1966), (attacked child labor)

Bitter Cry of Children

Famous muckrakers
Charlotte Perkins Gilman labor (1860-1935), attacked child

Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), attacked medicine industry and public health system

Famous muckrakers
Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946), attacked Americas racial divide

David Graham Phillips (1867-1911), attacked the corruption by big businesses of the Senate

D. G. Phillips: The Treason of the Senate

In February 1906, readers of Cosmopolitan magazine opened its pages to this statement: Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be. This indictment launched a nine-part series of articles entitled Treason of the Senate. The Treason series placed the Senate at the center of a major drive by Progressive Era reformers to weaken the influence of large corporations and other major financial interests on government policy making. Direct popular election of senators fit perfectly with their campaign to bring government closer to the people. As originally adopted, the Constitution provided for the election of senators by individual state legislatures. In the years following the Civil War, that system became increasingly subject to bribery, fraud, and deadlock. As Congress took on a greater role in shaping an industrializing nation, those with a major business stake in that development believed they could best exert their influence on the U.S. Senate by offering financial incentives to the state legislators who selected its members.

D. G. Phillips: The Treason of the Senate

The campaign for direct election of senators took on new force in 1906, following conviction of two senators on corruption charges. Each had taken fees for interceding with federal agencies on behalf of business clients. The resulting negative publicity inspired publisher William Randolph Hearst, then a U.S. House member and owner of Cosmopolitan magazine, to commission popular novelist David Graham Phillips to prepare a series of investigative articles. Making the point that large corporations and corrupt state legislators played too large a role in selection of senators, these articles doubled Cosmopolitans circulation within two months. Yet, Phillips' obvious reliance on innuendo and exaggeration soon earned him the scorn of other reformers. President Theodore Roosevelt saw in these charges a politically motivated effort by Hearst to discredit his administration, and coined the term "muckraker" to describe the Phillips brand of overstated and sensationalist journalism. For several decades before publication of Phillips series, certain southern senators had blocked the direct election amendment out of fear that it would increase the influence of African-American voters. By 1906, however, many southern states had enacted Jim Crow laws to undermine that influence. The Phillips series finally broke Senate resistance and opened the way for the amendments ratification in 1913.

Muckraker Encyclopedia Britannica

muckraker,any of a group of American writers, identified with pre-World War I reform and expos literature. The muckrakers provided detailed, accurate journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by the power of big business in a rapidly industrializing United States. The name muckraker was pejorative when used by President Theodore Roosevelt in his speech of April 14, 1906. But muckraker also came to take on favorable connotations of social concern and courageous exposition. The muckrakers work grew out of the yellow journalism of the 1890s, which whetted the public appetite for news arrestingly presented, and out of popular magazines, especially those established by S.S. McClure, Frank A. Munsey, and Peter F. Collier. The emergence of muckraking was heralded in the January 1903 issue of McClures Magazine by articles on municipal government, labor, and trusts, written by Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida M. Tarbell.

Muckraker Encyclopedia Britannica

The intense public interest aroused by articles critical of political corruption, industrial monopolies, and fraudulent business practices rallied journalists, novelists, and reformers of all sorts to sharpen their criticism of American society. Charles Edward Russell led the reform writers with exposs ranging from The Greatest Trust in the World (1905) to The Uprising of the Many (1907), the latter reporting methods being tried to extend democracy in other countries. Lincoln Steffens wrote on corrupt city and state politics in The Shame of the Cities (1904). Brand Whitlock, who wrote The Turn of the Balance (1907), a novel opposing capital punishment, was also a reform mayor of Toledo, Ohio. Thomas W. Lawson, a Boston financier, in Frenzied Finance (Everybodys, 190405), provided a major expos of stock-market abuses and insurance fraud. Ida M. Tarbells History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) exposed the corrupt practices used to form a great industrial monopoly. Edwin Markhams Children in Bondage was a major attack on child labor. Upton Sinclairs novel The Jungle (1906) and Samuel Hopkins Adams Great American Fraud (1906), combined with the work of Harvey W. Wiley and Senator Albert J. Beveridge, brought about passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. David Graham Phillips series The Treason of the Senate (Cosmopolitan, 1906), which inspired President Roosevelts speech in 1906, was influential in leading to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular senatorial elections. Muckraking as a movement disappeared latter.

1972 The Watergate Scandal

Vietnam War the public was against it The Pentagon Papers revealed by The New York Times The Washington Post Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein The Watergate Hotel Headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington Re-election of Richard Nixon Involved: FBI, CIA, White House, U. S. Administration