Donald Matheson
Investigative reporting’s importance to journalism lies primarily in its symbolic role: investigations, while rare, represent the practice at its best. Here journalism can be seen, often spectacularly, to be carrying out the fourth estate role described in the AngloAmerican liberal tradition. The Watergate scandal, although a significant moment in 1970s US politics, still has enormous resonance around the world more than 30 years later perhaps largely for this reason. It symbolises so successfully (particularly in the glamorous film version) the good that reporting can do, independently monitoring power and aligning itself with the interests of the people. Spectacular investigations can also be read as markers of significant change in the position of journalists within the political domain. The British Guardian’s ‘cash for questions’ investigations and a raft of other ‘sleaze’ exposés in the British media symbolised both the end of Conservative dominance in UK politics in the mid-1990s and the reinvigoration of a profession whose power of self-determination had been severely shaken by a coalition between the Thatcher Government and corporate media owners (Doig 1997).
The importance of these narratives is widely recognised in journalism studies – indeed Zelizer’s classic study of journalism as an interpretive community uses as one of its key examples the reception by US journalists of the Watergate scandal (Zelizer 1993). Yet scholars and journalists have become increasingly sceptical of the way journalism culture has told the story, particularly in relation to politics. This is only partly a matter of a weakening in the actual numbers of high-profile exposés of political malfeasance. More significantly, studies of journalism and politics suggest that the media’s role in battles against the abuse of political power can no longer be made to fit very well the stories told of reporters conducting independent investigations of political power.
This chapter explores, then, a weakening of the symbolic power of the figure of the dogged, lone, investigative reporter in Western democracies. It suggests, firstly, that the critical literature concentrates too much on fears of a decline in journalistic investigation, defining the practice in terms of mythic exemplars such as Watergate. The argument, secondly, proposes that the heroic figure of the investigative reporter makes a little less sense in a world where the media are themselves so powerful that they, in some estimations, form the stage on which much politics is carried out. Indeed, the Watergate story itself can be re-read as part of the rise of scandal politics and the rise of an audit culture in public life, in which other actors play a more powerful role than journalists. Consequently, this chapter will emphasise less a story of decline in investigative reporting than one of such significant change that the dominant narrative of the investigative is losing some purchase. Indeed, as will be discussed in the final section, other narratives of investigation are gaining some prominence among journalists.
The analysis of a decline in the number of investigations of political power by journalists in Western democracies undoubtedly has much to recommend it. The pressures on this kind of reporting have always been intense, but an economic downturn in the news business, combined with the tightening in a number of countries of laws limiting journalists’ access to information, often on the grounds of national security, has arguably tipped the scales. The former head of the US Center for Public Integrity, Charles Lewis (2007), notes that the ‘landscape looks precarious’ for serious, well-resourced journalism, citing research showing a drop in the volume and the quality of journalism in newspapers in the US. In what some called the ‘midsummer massacre’, 4000 newspaper jobs disappeared there in July and August, 2008. In all Western countries, news consumption is trending downwards (a drop of two million readers for British national newspapers in 10 years; Tumber & Waisbord 2004b). Consequently, the resources for long investigations in the public interest are tight. Davies (2008) argues that, partly because of those financial pressures, much UK journalism is becoming ‘churnalism’, or low-quality material largely dependent on press releases and media minders.
Investigative reporting has, it should be pointed out, risen and fallen in the past. Weinberg (1996: 283) notes that the sudden explosion of ‘muckraking’ onto the US political scene at the turn of the twentieth century was followed by 30 years of decline in quantity and quality. Doig (1997) charts the rise of modern investigative reporting in the 1970s in the UK, when the Sunday Times launched its highly successful ‘Insight’ team, followed by a decline in the 1980s. Waisbord (1996) describes a sudden increase in newspaper and television news investigations of politicians in South America in the 1990s, leading to the fall of the Brazilian and Venezuelan presidents and other officials. The reasons behind these patterns are contested – Waisbord, for example, argues that investigative reporting does not simply reflect changes in press freedoms or democratic processes, but also a complex mix of factors, ranging from the economic to the professional and the political. It should also be noted that the number of investigations at any one time is small, and that therefore a few high profile cases, whether it is the success of the Watergate investigation or indeed the alleged punishment of Thames Television by the Thatcher Government through regulatory reform after its investigation into its shooting by British Agents of unarmed IRA activists, are often read as symptomatic of the wider state of investigative journalism, if not of journalism in general (Doig 1997: 204–5).
Molloy notes that journalism is also prone to a golden age-ism, by which the state of journalism a generation earlier is invariably romanticised and the present state lamented (cited in Thomas 2000). Particularly in the case of investigative reporting, because of its resonance in the interpretive community of journalism, there is some risk that changes in practice will be read as decline. Mair (2008) makes just this point, suggesting that Davies’ lament overstates the problem, and concluding that: ‘The watchdog that is the British national press is now barking in different ways’ (2008: 48). As explored in the remainder of this chapter, this view gains some support if we look beyond the dominant model of investigative reporting. Lewis (2007), whose concern at the ailing US newspaper business is cited above, points to the rise of other ways of funding and conducting investigative journalism, including journalists working with non-profit institutes rather than relying on corporate-owned news. While Lewis focuses on business models, the question is perhaps at heart one of the stories and definitions that journalists and critics use to discuss the investigation and critique of power.
There has been considerable homogeneity in the idea of investigative reporting, certainly within the Anglo-American tradition. From W.T. Stead’s undercover exposé of child sex slavery in 1880s London, which brought crowds onto the streets protesting for reform, to William Howard Russell’s exposure of conditions within the British Army in the Crimea, to the Watergate case, most stories told of this kind of reporting are similar. A model is discernible in which independent journalists investigate the moral lapses of politicians, triumphing despite intimidation, legal barriers and a shortage of money because of the support of editors and their careful accumulation of factual evidence. In the end they stimulate public indignation and force the resignation or overthrow of those politicians. These stories solidify into slightly different definitions in different accounts. Blevens (1997) cites a number of journalists and critics who define the practice as involving the uncovering of secret or concealed information, others who emphasise the skills required, and others who emphasise the independence of journalists from power. As the gloss often used in the US, ‘enterprise reporting’, suggests, all seem to agree that investigations are moments when journalism steps outside its usual practices of tracking the debates amongst society’s dominant voices or reproducing the material pre-produced for it by public relations. In this process of setting independent agendas and deploying greater detective skills, journalists seek out difficult to access sources, analyse original documents and confront the powerful with alternative accounts. Investigative reporting therefore allows journalists to feel their craft at least sometimes lives up to the highest expectations of it. It is a term particularly associated with Anglo-American liberal journalism, where facticity and impartiality are what Z elizer (2004) calls ‘god-terms’, and perhaps less clearly identifiable in places where the line between reporting and opinion is less clear (Waisbord 1996). In the United States in particular, investigative reporting allows journalism, at least for brief moments, to reconcile its somewhat contradictory notion of itself as both an objective recorder of fact and a crusader for justice. Ettema and Glasser (1998), in the major study of US investigative reporting, talk of the combination of the ‘fiercest of indignation’ with the ‘hardest of fact’ (1998: 3).
At the centre of the idea of investigative journalism lies Watergate, the story of two junior reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who from 1972 to 1974 doggedly pursued electoral espionage and subsequent cover-up by officials of the Republican Party, a story which finally engulfed President Nixon. Schudson (1995, 2004) calls it the archetype of investigative journalism and a moment which ‘overwhelms modern American journalism’. Weinberg (1996) uses it as the paradigmatic case by which to distinguish investigations from other struggles to hold politics to account. From Irangate to minor scandals such as Cheriegate, it defines political crisis brought on by journalistic investigation.1 The story is used both as a model and to castigate journalism which falls short. As Schudson (1995) notes, Watergate has this power because, at least as told by the reporters in their book and the 1975 film, ‘All the President’s Men’, it confirmed and gave new form so tidily to journalistic ideals of its independence, public interest and political power.
Watergate and similar stories told within journalism are mythic, in Barthes’ (1973) sense of structures which make sense of and organise other occurrences. They are also mythic, however, in the related sense of being idealised tellings that over-emphasise journalism’s heroism. For, Schudson also notes, most of what the reporters found out was also known already to the FBI and other agencies investigating the break-in and related issues. Indeed it was brave officials who leaked much of this to the reporters and the campaigning judge John Sirica who pushed the small players in the story to implicate those above them. In addition, very few of the 400 Washington correspondents at the time worked on the story, at least while it remained controversial. Watergate does not live up well to its own myth. But it is a powerful mobilising force. The ‘kernel of truth’ in the tale sustains a larger truth of ‘what we may have been once, what we might again become, what we would like to be “if” ’ (Schudson, 1995: 123). In doing so, of course, the risk is that it becomes a comfortable credo, which journalists can recite to buttress their sense that what they do is more than a commercial product or in the service of elites. Rosen (2005) charges that it is a credo which does not prepare journalists particularly well for a world where reporting is rewarded much more poorly than punditry, where the truth rarely wins out by itself and where journalism does not stand outside politics, looking in, but is often closely tied to power.
Another version of the Watergate story, told by political scientists and journalism scholars, is that it was an early moment in the wave of scandals which has washed over late twentieth-century Western political life. In one of the few long-term studies in this area, Benson and Hallin (2005) find that in both France and the US, the number of media scandals roughly doubled between the 1960s and the 1990s. Tumber and Waisbord note that many countries, from the United States to South Korea to India, appear to be in a state of ‘permanent scandal’ (Tumber & Waisbord 2004a: 1031). Castells describes a market for damaging political information which emerges once corruption of one kind or another becomes a public topic, leading to more and more stories of this kind (Castells 1996: 338, cited in Tumber & Waisbord 2004a: 1034). In Thompson’s (2000) influential analysis, the various kinds of political scandal (about the abuse of power, finances, or the personal lives of politicians) can be traced back to the growing importance of the media as a site of political power, and the importance of reputation in this form of power. Sanders and Canel (2007: 457) write:
Reputation is a kind of resource, a symbolic capital, allowing politicians to build up legitimacy, to develop trust among several publics including fellow politicians, the electorate and media professionals. Politicians must constantly use ‘symbolic power’ to persuade, confront, influence actions and beliefs (Thompson 2000: 262). Scandal is important because it can destroy this resource.
Much of the investigative reporting surrounding politics in recent years, including the ‘sleaze’ stories on the infidelities and sexual preferences of British Conservative MPs, makes sense in terms of this contest for symbolic capital.
Media scandal also, then, goes hand in hand with the growth of promotional politics. As politics becomes ever more a matter of visibility and less one of policies or ideological alignments (Bennett 2001; Thompson 2000), political actors grow ever more sophisticated in managing their symbolic selves. The scandal that disrupts that management by bringing secret or backstage information onto the front stage – recordings of private conversations that contradict stated policy, for example – becomes significant. For politicians, it is a way to damage their opponents; for journalists, scandals are a display of their independence in the face of increased media management, as well as being good for ratings.
The importance of personal reputation in political power also has a cultural dimension. Thompson (2000) suggests that scandals are part of a cultural change in which social distance is being compressed, so that politicians become judged in terms of everyday and interpersonal relations, and particularly in terms of trust. Seen in this wider frame, scandals may be viewed not so much as debased journalism but as part of the way power is contested in mediated politics. El Gody (2007) describes something of this sort taking place in the pan-Arabic public space. Al Jazeera’s approach to critiquing Arab political leaders, he argues, is ‘politainment’, which works to delegitimise Arab governments through discussion of financial and power scandals on its talk show and interview programmes. The US comedy current affairs programme, ‘The Daily Show’, is discussed in similar terms by a number of scholars as an enormously influential site where the political legitimacy of political and media elites is contested by exposing duplicity and dissembling.
Scholarship has, then, steadily undermined the heroic myth of the individual journalist’s morally charged exposure of hidden facts. Not only is the journalist no longer the driving force behind the exposure of wrongs, for in these analyses changes in politics and culture are more important drivers, but the media’s role changes from one of setting the agenda to providing the stage for scandal. Liebes and Blum-Kulka (2007) argue that journalists are relatively weak in uncovering scandals, which depend more on whistle-blowers or sources with their own agendas. Feldstein (2007) similarly describes journalists as ‘ventriloquists’ much of the time, amplifying stories seeded by sources with particular agendas. ‘Often the journalist is merely the conduit, a nearly interchangeable vessel selected as the vehicle for furthering the informant’s objectives’ (2007: 505). Spanish reporter Fernando Garea told researchers that, even in investigative reporting, much of the material comes from unsolicited phone calls or letters: ‘the myths about investigative journalism should be exploded because it’s really much more simple’ (Sanders & Canel 2006: 463). Williams and Delli Carpini (2004) go as far as to say that the mainstream press has virtually lost its gatekeeping role in this kind of story, with its emphasis less on the uncovering of factual details of events and more on the individual’s reputation, for that kind of reporting takes place as easily on satellite and cable television comedy shows, the Internet and talk shows. They conclude that the traditional faces of the elite – journalists, policy experts and public officials – have lost power in this new media system, but that overall political elites, transformed into celebrities and therefore able to move between news, sports and entertainment media with ease, have maintained power. In that scenario, journalism’s independence as an arbiter of public affairs is severely diminished, a point they explore by examining the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal of the late 1990s. Not only was the story of the president’s sexual activities broken by Matt Drudge on his website, but the story spread though talk radio and comedy shows as much as through news journalism. One could spend 24 hours a day hearing about the scandal in the US and ‘tellingly, one could do so without ever tuning in or picking up a traditional news source’ (Williams & Delli Carpini 2004: 1221).
In addition, there is some consensus that other actors have taken over the investigative function that the Watergate story expects journalism to perform in relation to a scandal. In the Clinton–Lewinsky case, it was well organised right-wing groups. Williams and Delli Carpini (2004: 1226) talk of an ‘insurgency movement by the far right’ that was able to make most effective use of talk radio and other emergent media. In Germany, journalism appears to have played a minor role in uncovering the immense political scandal that has brewed for nearly 10 years over corruption within the CDU, ultimately implicating its former leader Helmut Kohl, when compared to the efforts of public prosecutors and CDU insiders (Esser & Hartung 2004: 1056). The audit culture (O’Neill 2002) which has swept over Western public life provides a multitude of such agencies doing what muckraking or investigative journalists might have done in the past, but in far greater thoroughness and with better resources.
These points converge in the observation made by a number of critics that investigative journalism, where the reporter goes undercover or vouches for what he or she has found out from documents or sources, has been eclipsed to an extent by journalism which provides a stage on which others act out the norms and limits of acceptable political behaviour. As Gaines (2007) puts it in his nostalgic account of the demise of stings and undercover reporting, television cameras eliminate the need for the firstperson account by the reporter, for they work by displaying people talking deceitfully. This kind of journalism is by no means passive but it has more of what Cottle (2006) calls a ritual power of bringing people together in a mediated moment that symbolises and restates ideas of how society should be. It is performative, an act of speech, like a promise or accusation or christening, that does not describe something outside itself but performs its own meaning. Ekström and Johansson (2008: 65) write that news media:
put a great deal of work into creating conditions in which such scandals could occur, preferably in front of the photographers’ cameras so that they can be shown live. The central focus of the media’s involvement changes from the revelation to the staging of transgressions.
A political scandal, in this sense, is largely a matter of talk (ibid.: 72). In staging politics in this way, journalists ask interview questions with the goal of causing politicians themselves to reveal what lies behind their pre-planned actions, or they juxtapose previous statements with contemporary ones as ironic devices to demonstrate the less than truthful nature of the latest utterances.
While we might lament these changes, they do also give weight to Schudson’s (2005) argument that journalism’s stories of its independence and mobilisation of the population may be exaggerated. Feldstein (2007) proposes a model in which journalistic investigations belong to a relatively closed world of elites. In simulating rather than stimulating public outrage, journalists become in effect collaborators with the elites whom they are claiming to hold to account. From nineteenth-century ‘Tammany Hall’ graft to the Enron and Arthur Andersen accounting scandal in 2001, journalists have been much less independent fact-gatherers, and much more dependent on elite whistleblowers or informants, than they might claim. Rosen (2005) accuses journalism of deluding itself, implying it needs to live in the light of fact not myth. An alternative approach would be to give space to a wider range of stories to imagine – and model – journalism in an evolving political and cultural context. Such work requires sustained analysis of journalism culture, but some suggestions are made below of emergent alternative models of investigative journalism.
If the literature suggests the notion of journalism as uniquely positioned to independently investigate political life is overstated, there is perhaps value in exploring forms of investigative journalism in which reporters consciously work with others. In the mid-nineteenth century, when The Times thundered against British military incompetence in the Crimea, the liberal creed that ‘a free press able and willing to expose corruption’ lay at the heart of political accountability carried some weight (Diamond & Plattner 1993: 101; cited in Tumber & Waisbord 2004a: 1035). If public life is now crowded with organisations auditing the state sector, producing analyses, mobilising public opinion and investigating problems, other stories than the reporter-centred Watergate myth might make more sense of journalism’s best work. Heroes in this other kind of story might include organisations such as the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, founded by four British, US and Serbian journalists during the 1990s Balkans wars. The IWPR has exposed war crimes, injustices and systematic problems not so much through the reports by its staff as through training local journalists in many war-torn countries and disseminating their reports. These include reports detailing war crimes and the rule of vigilante law in parts of Kosovo. Lewis (2008) points to many such NGOs and non-profits involved in investigative journalism, from the mundane level of consumer lobby groups, many of whose high quality consumer reports shape news agendas, to groups such as the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which part-funded Seymour Hersh’s reporting in 1969 of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He sees this broadening of the investigatory effort as a ‘way to rejuvenate and sustain the soul of journalism’ (36).
There are risks to journalism’s independence in these ventures. State aid money from the West, for example, funds investigative centres in some countries. Worse, some of these organisations have been tentatively linked to security services. The rise of OhmyNews in South Korea, in which journalist Oh Yeon-Ho was joined by tens of thousands of citizen journalists in what he called ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the country’s conservative media and the conservative government it supported (Hauben 2005), would trouble many journalists. The line between campaigning journalism and a political campaign was weak here – indeed rather than bring down a politician, OhmyNews’s claim to fame is that it helped bring reformist president Roh Moo-hyun into power. There is perhaps value in journalism acknowledging that the ideals of objectivity do not always further it in calling power to account (see also Waisbord 1996, Ettema & Glasser 1998, Benson & Hallin 2005). Regardless of which version of the collaboration story is emphasised, however, what is important is that journalism foregrounds and therefore takes responsibility for how and with whom it collaborates in these tales of the institution of the news responding to powerful sources through planned and sustained collaborations, often with otherwise weak or even unheard sources, to cast fresh light on the workings of power.
The second, and related, model involves less of an emphasis on journalism which exposes corruption and more on connecting up information on the workings of power and therefore fostering greater transparency. Contemporary Western journalism operates in an information-saturated society, what Castells (1996) terms informationalism, in which power lies not so much in having information as in being able to deploy it quickly. This is true of financial markets, but also of the struggle against dictatorship. In Z imbabwe, for example, a key part of the story of struggle is the use made of digital media by groups such as Sokwanele Civic Action Support Group,2 which gathered the results of the 2008 presidential and parliamentary ballots, posted outside each polling booth, making it harder for the Harare-based electoral commission to massage the final figures. During the subsequent political turmoil its website also featured a ‘mashup’, or combination of media forms, in which a map of Zimbabwe was overlaid with clickable icons representing political murders and acts of intimidation. This information, available in fragmented form elsewhere, became a powerful indictment when gathered together. A similar role is performed by ‘Iraq Body Count’, a website which gathers media accounts of the deaths of civilians since the US-led invasion of Iraq, as a pointed reminder to the US and UK governments of the civilian casualty figures they have themselves refused to make available. Many current experiments in US political investigative reporting are of this kind, from the Sunlight Foundation’s digitising of US official documents (Allison 2008), to blogger Josh Marshall’s use of his readers to plough through enormous piles of documents released during the Gonzalez scandal (Niles 2007). The information here is not the dramatic disclosure of previously hidden wrong behaviour which mobilises public sentiment. Journalism is not operating as a check on power but as an actor. Instead, the information makes sense in terms of the contemporary value placed on deliberative democracy (e.g. Giddens 1984: 114ff), where decision-making must be transparent, conducted on the public stage which the media themselves construct and call people to, in order to be legitimate. Because of the power of Sokwanele to link up voting information in near real time, the Zimbabwe elections happened partly through its investigations, and its website became one of the stages on which politics took place.
Such stories are beginning to appear in fora such as the Investigative Reporters and Editors journal and at the many conferences now being hosted by the growing global networks of investigative reporters (see Aucoin 2008). They suggest two things. Firstly, when it is forced to change by external pressures, whether economic or cultural, journalism does not necessarily simply get worse. In some aspects it changes, and out of that change comes some realignment of journalism with its context. In a world where political groups strategise their use of the media and where media act as the central stage of political life, a journalism of radical independence is perhaps less tenable at times than one which enters into strategic partnerships to open up access to other voices. In a media-saturated, always-on world, media which are used as a stage on which information is linked up at speed, allow journalists and activists to make powerful claims to enact a more deliberative democracy. Secondly, these stories suggest there are many ways to do investigative journalism. There is some merit in the scepticism from some journalists of the hype over its investigative branch. The late Paul Foot, for example, has argued: ‘all journalism worthy of the name carries with it a duty to ask questions, check facts, investigate’ (Foot 1998: 81; cited in Sanders & Canel 2006: 454). The dominance of one mythic ideal of investigation is a limiting force within journalism. To close, while one would not want to celebrate the enormous economic pressures on news practice which are weakening the purchase of the Watergate ideal, there are other stories to tell.
1 See Wikipedia for a list of around 50 such ‘-gate’ scandals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix.
2 Sokwanele is a Shona phrase that apparently translates as ‘enough is enough’.
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