investigations

INVESTIGATIONS: "J'Accuse! - We name the guilty men! "

Notes by Chris Horrie

"Investigative journalism" is a huge subject which will, in due course, be dealt with in a related INVESTIGATIVE WEB related to this site.

Basically all it means that the journalist has initiated the story - as oppose to the normal method of simply following what is happening in the courts, council, parliament, scheduled meetings (etc - the news agenda) or responding to some unscheduled disaster or crisis.

It therefore overlaps with GONZO journalism. The original humdinger investigative piece J'ACCUSE! was initiated by the writer and journalist Emile Zola. He formed the view that the French army officer Dreyfus (sent to Devil's Island had been scapegoated and framed. he went over the court case and proved this was the case, got Dreyfus out of jail and caused the Government to fall and the French state to be modernised and reformed.

In more recent times the Washington Post team of Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Nixon Watergate scandal. Granada's World in Action TV show (now defunct) managed to get the framed "Birmingham Six" out of jail.

The most common types of investigative pieces involve reviewing miscarriages of justice; exposing consumer rip-offs and working, generally, with the police when they can't get a conviction. There is a legal dimension to all this which we will discuss as part of the law module.

An LA Times series of articles clustered as "The new FDA" (Food and Drug Administration) showing how they approved the distribution of seven different types of dangerous drugs won the Current Pulitzer prize. You can read the articles here. (If link not working try search LA Times and searching for DURCAT.

Investigative work requires a great deal of experience in doing a lot of "normal" (non-journalist initiated journalism) first.

We will return to it in due course.

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FEATURES WEB (internal links)

1. Introduction 2. News Features 3. Confessional/ Human Interest 4. Profiles

5. Feature Interviews 6. Arts Reviews 7. Consumer Reviews 8. Investigations

9. Observational/Reportage 10. Reader Response 11. Photojournalism 12. Comment