Basic TV Reporting, 2nd Edition

Investigative Journalism

The term ‘investigative journalism’ is one freely applied by many young reporters to what they regard as a romantic if rather shadowy side of the business. They see themselves uncovering wrongdoing and fearlessly exposing it. They have as an example the Watergate scandal and the part played by journalists–particularly Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post-in the eventual downfall of President Nixon in 1974.

But investigative journalism, conducted properly, is a time-consuming and expensive business. Newspapers which treat it seriously accept that it is a team effort, assigning researchers and reporters for weeks, perhaps months, swamping a subject from all sides to produce a mass of material from which ...