I was watching Jon Stewart tonight and John Oliver did a segment on how CNN disbanded it’s investigative unit. I tracked down the media bistro report that they seemed to be referencing from March of last year and if you read that, it doesn’t seem quite so cut and dried. But the way they play it up, it’s as if CNN is little better than Faux News.
So what’s the deal here? Do I actually have to start reading my subscription to the Economist now? Or are they piggy backing off other sub-contractors just like CNN?
TV news isn’t really conductive to long-form investigative reporting. And most news outfits are for-profit businesses, not really founded in the public interest but to attract as much advertising dollars as possible with sensationalistic stories. Biases aside, both CNN and Fox suffer from the inanities of the broadcast TV format: it’s gotta be short, visually appealing, and easy for the dumb audience to understand – criteria that most serious investigative reporting would fail.
Friend of mine works at the Center for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit news outfit, and they still did some investigative reporting last time I checked. Wikipedia also mentions the Investigative News Network, which I’ve never heard of but which is supposedly an alliance of 70+ organizations that do investigative reporting.
Straying a bit into IMHO territory, if you must stick with TV, I found that the BBC and Al-Jazeera (where available) typically gets you better coverage than the American crap. On occasion, random magazines will publish long investigative pieces by semi-freelance writers who can’t/don’t sell to the mainstream outlets. Annually, some of these are chronicled in the “Best American Magazine Writing” book.
Journalism has changed rapidly (and continues to) and today much info comes out in little tidbids from different organizations, bloggers, ordinary citizens tweeting, etc. We no longer live in a world where you have to wait for big media to bring you in-depth coverage. Just customize Google News with topics that you care about, and when something surfaces, find more coverage yourself instead of waiting for some pretty anchor somewhere to report on it.
It seems that CNN is outsourcing investigative journalism.
It would be like firing your full-time plumber so you can use several plumbing services for specific jobs.
Investigative journalism lends itself more to the documentary or book than a four minute cable news segment. And many IJs are freelancers.
TV still has fact-checkers and journalists and on-the-scene reporting. The work that Richard Engel does on the forefront of conflicts in the Arab world for NBC/MSNBC is amazing. It is definitely first-hand, primary-source, and current news. However, it’s not the dogged work-for-months digging-up-secrets type of work that is investigative journalism.
Various decent newspapers do local/state investigative journalism. For instance, the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune regularly do pieces that turn up corruption and other problems in the city/state, and often beyond. The most recent ones I can think of off the top of my head are:
Yes, although many newspapers have cut back their investigative units, so that what you have left is a typical beat reporter (city hall, police, business or whatever) working on an investigative piece along with their day-to-day assignments. So what you end up with is a handful of pieces on different topics coming out at random times during the year.
They really aren’t any better, they just have a different slant. IMHO, they seem to be very Obama-friendly, moreso than, for example, your typical newspaper. Speaking of which, newspapers seem to be the only real source for halfway-decent investigative journalism, which makes it all the worse that they’re dying out.
What about the Economist? Do they sub out their reporting or when I read about drug smuggling in Guinea-Bissau, can I trust that they are getting the inside scoop from their own sources?
BBC was mentioned up thread, and that is a rather fine example of a TV network that can, and are indeed required to, use a certain amount of resources on investigative pieces. The reason for this is that the BBC, as well as quite a few other national broadcasters in Europe, are publicly funded through a dedicated television tax or similar.
This is of course more difficult for pure commercial networks who has to look to their advertisers and has to make purely financial decisions about every program they run, or how to prioritize their resources.
Yes, all the stories I’ve seen in recent years about local corruption and malfeasance – and there have been plenty – have been broken by local newspapers.