The Demise of Investigative Journalism

The 20,000 journalism jobs lost in the past 18 months are flushing knowledge and experience out of American newsrooms, diminishing our lives and our democracy. The brain drain is exacting penalties that society may live to regret.

As professionals depart paid journalism, secrecy and corruption will flourish. Fear of public exposure is one of the few brakes on such behavior. The American Society of Journalists and Authors represents independent journalists, and our members are among those striving to pick up the slack in investigative journalism.

Veteran journalists are being pushed aside for beginning reporters without watchdog experience. What's filling news holes are superficial events coverage and fast "content" production that's farmed out to wire services, usually without reporters' bylines. The Internet, with few exceptions, is not replacing newspapers and magazines in providing paychecks for investigative reporters.

It took the public months to learn that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because news outlets did not challenge the administration's story. The Associated Press reports that the Pentagon budget for public relations has increased by 63 percent since 2004 as it struggles for support of the Iraq war. The military will spend at least $4.7 billion in 2009, according to the AP. Imagine the challenge of journalists to get past the strength of this promotional marketing. If there's something to uncover here, it likely won't be discovered by a diminished press corps.

As financial support of serious journalism evaporates, reporters and editors will be reduced to chronicling the obvious, and dramatizing rather than digging. "If it bleeds, it leads" will become our society's ticket to information. That is one slim newsfeed.

Enterprise reporting costs news venues money. The payoff is in information-news that communities need to be healthy. This lament of a diminished world just isn't the tears of men and women practicing outdated technology. The need for knowing what is happening in our world is universal and eternal, no matter how it's transmitted.

What does it mean to lose the voices of those who hold our institutions accountable? How can we avoid the regret of a ruined system that once paid attention, if not perfectly, at least with professional standards, to school boards, health departments, legislatures, charities and corporations?

Investigative journalism is important. It saves lives and protects the public from corruption. How did we learn that the wood in playground equipment was treated with serious cancer-causing preservatives? Or that our government paid for poor patients to be injected with plutonium for horrifying medical research that killed and maimed them? We know these facts because reporters told us. Improvements in society don't come without a push. It's often news reporting that's behind legislatures, regulators, and trade groups finally acting to clean up abuses.

Our vigorous free press is one of the beacons that set America apart.

But those of us in the profession are watching with horror at how quickly that light is being extinguished and how little the public seems to care.

There is the possibility that freelance writers will be tapped to fill the void as newspapers and magazines lose staff, but managers still need to find the money for serious journalism, whether on-staff or off. During the transition to whatever comes next for investigative reporting, the public should know what it's missing.

We hope that media companies will recognize the value of professional watchdogs in the journalism community. Readers must let their news providers know that they want in-depth coverage of issues that matter. Without an outcry, we'll be left with pale imitations of news we need.

Comments

[demockracy]

You are correct in assessing the problem, but what's the solution?

[MinasTirith]

The article was right on in its statement of 'If it bleeds, it leads'...

The problem is that if it sells, (Read: Tabloid News) then it leads, too. Since Cable News came online with its desire to sell news, it quickly learned that the only way to make it profitable was to hype it, focus on the micro tag line/sound byte, and invent it by creating stories out of literally nothing. The focus on 'Is Obama doing too much?' tripe, and the 'Obama Bear Market' noise, are but two recent examples of non-news being hyped into something purportedly news worthy.

Who needs to investigate and spend all that time and money, when you can simply create/inflate a non-news story into whatever importance you'd like?

Since the MSM is essentially spoon feeding us whatever the Corporations behind them want to sell us in terms of ideas, we are no longer privy to a truly 'free' press; it is manipulated to deliver an intended message that is based on both the ability to sell advertising space, and the ability to forward the agenda of whatever company is behind the particular news outlet the viewer tunes into at the time.

Have we learned nothing from the rest of our capitalistic system? Anything you can sell will always be sold such that it contains the least valuable content, for the greatest profit.