The Demise of Investigative Journalism

by Russell Wild and Margaret Engel
2009-02-17

According to some estimates, 20,000 journalism jobs have been lost in the past 18 months. Knowledge and experience are being flushed out of American newsrooms, diminishing our lives and our democracy. The brain drain is exacting penalties that society may live to regret.

How do you measure the stories that aren't told and the facts that aren't discovered? As professionals depart paid journalism, it is clear that 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 (ASJA) represents independent journalists, and some of our members are among those striving to pick up the slack in investigative journalism, but the gap is large.

Community observers, working for free, can't replace the talented diggers who knew where to look and who spent decades learning how to find news of overwhelming importance. 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 resources (read: paychecks) for investigative reporters. Nor can television and radio, both licensed by government, ever fill the role of democracy's watchdog.

It took the public months to learn that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because most news outlets did not challenge the administration's story. The Associated Press reports this month that the Pentagon budget for public relations has increased by 63 percent over the past five years as it struggles for support of the Iraq war and for new recruits. 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.

News is not what crawls across the bottom of your screen. Zippers, with reports of floods, famine, crashes and disasters of all description, give the public the myth of being informed.

As financial support of serious journalism evaporates, reporters will be reduced to chronicling the obvious and ignoring the investigative. "If it bleeds, it leads" will not just be the scornful motto of eyewitness newscasts, it will become a community's whole meal. That is one slim newsfeed.

Enterprise reporting doesn't pay in dollars. Rather, it costs news venues money -- to accomplish and defend it. The payoff is in information -- news that communities need to be healthy. Have the decades of beating up on journalists for the perceived and real arrogance of the press blinded audiences to what they will be missing?

This lament of a diminished world just isn't the tears of men and women practicing an outdated technology. The need for knowing what is truly 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 kids' playground equipment used to be 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, and so much more, because reporters, photographers, researchers and editors told us.. Improvements in society don't come without a push and it's often news reporting that's behind legislatures, regulators, and trade groups finally acting to clean up abuses.

There's nothing like the depth of our unfettered system anywhere in the world. 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's some encouraging efforts by philanthropists to underwrite investigative reporting, but the need far exceeds the private resources that have been offered thus far.

Rescue attempts, such as educating writers on how to launch their own media companies, are months if not years away from succeeding. 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.

---

Russell Wild is president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), the nation's professional association of independent nonfiction writers. ASJA member Margaret Engel is director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the nation's oldest journalism writing fellowship program, chair of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards board, and a member of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors.