Our lecture this week focused on an extremely important aspect of our work; Investigative Journalism. To be an investigative journalist takes a very particular kind of person and so far I'm wondering whether that person could ever be me. In the lecture we looked at all sorts of examples of investigative journalism and some made it seem so glamorous whilst others made investigative journalism seem like a rather grubby profession in which your main goal is to destroy others, somehow not from malice but from your own inclination to find a story anywhere. Before the Times was bought by Murdoch the editor of the Sunday Times was Harry Evans who had his own special group of journalists called, 'The Insight Team' whose job it was to simply go out and investigate whatever news stories they could think of. "Local Shopkeepers are running a drug dealing business on the side. Well they're probably not but it's worth investigating anyway, just in case". They actually got to do that for a job, those were the days, the story that the journalist originated instead of it coming to them through the courts of the government. The most famous case of investigative journalism from Harry Evans' Insight Team was the Thalidomide case where a report was done into why hundreds of children had not received compensation for the severe birth defects that they had suffered. After investigation by the Insight team and a high profile campaign by Evans himself they took on the medical company and won, securing the compensation for the children and changing the law on reporting civil cases in the process.
Journalism is the business of selling information and the only difference between journalism and investigative journalism is that you get the information yourself and originate the story. An example of this is Watergate where the story came from a source as opposed to the courts and the usual way of collecting news. Often certain techniques that could be seen as illegal may have to be used to get your information, a key technique being subterfuge. This is essentially going under cover to get your story, the camera in a bag technique, the fake sheik, the list goes on. To do this is OK as long as it is part of some good strong journalism and the story is in the public interest; using it to secretly film someone just for fun is not on. Before Murdoch, (B.M.), investigative journalism was much more valid and relevant but now, the techniques are being used to find out about celebrity splits and sport star haircuts and so it gives the whole profession a bad name. Investigative journalism should be about saving innocent people from prison on the charge of bombing a pub in Birmingham, purely on the basis that the IRA did it and they were Irish or exposing the sale of rotten meat, unfit for human consumption to the Rochdale Schools service. Although these examples may seem either far fetched or oddly specific, they really did happen, reported on and exposed by the now sadly defunct World in Action programme.
The earliest investigative journalist was Emile Zola, often referred to as the father/founder of investigative journalism. He was known as a realist in literature, similar to Dickens but often thought of as more of a journalist than Dickens. His biggest moment in investigative journalism came after the Franco-Prussian war which the French lost and then decided to blame the loss on the Jews who they said were selling military secrets. One of the top officers in the army, a Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused and court-martialled, simply because he was Jewish and a simple scapegoat. Zola took the view that they framed him and was persecuted for this, he had to live in exile before writing his most famous piece, "J'accuse" which accused the highest levels of the army and government of anti-semitism. Eventually though after many years Dreyfus was exonerated but it would not have happened without the tireless investigation of Emile Zola. Journalists are for this reason sometimes seen as a fourth state; you have the executive, the legislature and the judiciary but journalism has so much power that it can be called the fourth state.
There are some difficulties in investigative journalism as the things you are most likely to be accused of are defamation and libel, two civil cases which you need to know your defences for. You also need to understand the evidence gap, something you don't come across in criminal court. In the civil court cases you only need to prove something on the balance of probability as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt. It is very difficult to prove something beyond reasonable doubt but to prove you had malice when you wrote something 'on the balance of probability' would be quite simple. There are some complicated cases where a newspaper has gone out of its way to libel people after a case has been mishandled. The Stephen Lawrence case for example where the Daily Mail published a headline saying 'Murderers' and a positive ID on every single one of them, they somehow escaped because the people would never have challenged it as that would take it to civil court where they would only need to prove that they probably killed him to get them convicted.
In summary. Investigative journalism is an exciting field of journalism but certainly not for everyone. You can bring people down with good investigative journalism, and that sort of power is difficult to comprehend. Maybe we should save that for another day.
Until next time. You stay Classy Internet.
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