Our final lecture was a great way to finish off the semester and is something that I love and would be very interested in doing.
A quote from Ross Coulthart at the beginning asking 'Isn't all journalism supposed to be investigative?' was a decent question, but I don't think it fully demonstrates that there are differences in scale and importance of the story. These things then go on to affect the thoroughness and quality of investigation.
The next quote is really idealistic, but it's a good idea. To discover the truth and identify lapses in it is what the free world hopes of its media sources, but which I believe it doesn't often deliver. The ABC and SBS are reasonably good media sources, but News ltd. and Fairfax media is very selective in its stories, very rarely running with anything educational.
We were then outlined the 'in's' of investigative.
Intelligent, informed, intuitive, inside and invest. 'Inside' and 'Invest' are the two that intrigued me the most, they sound exciting!
After discussing that, we went into some more depth, talking about investigative journalism's purpose as a government watchdog, as a voice for the voiceless and to hold the powerful to account. The one that interest's me the most is that the media is expected to be 'custodians of conscience'. I like the idea of holding the peoples hypocrisy up for them to see.
A major part of investigative journalism is to cut through the agenda that almost everything has, in order to produce a story that shows the facts for what they are.
We spent a long time on this, with quotes from the Courier Mail, the ABC and the Fitzgerald report, before moving on to examples of good investigative journalism.
The Watergate scandal was one that I recognised and of course Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I'm on the sceptical side of Assanges claim to being a journalist. Wikileaks is simply a dumping site for clandestine documents, it doesn't do any more than emit raw data for true journalists to make a story of.
We were introduced to a few local investigative journalism websites and then moved on to types of investigative interactions and methods.
Threats to investigative journalism was the last thing to be discussed. Online news was addressed, the YouTube page dedicated to it, and PR.
I really enjoyed this lecture, and the whole semester.
Thanks.
