Investigative Reporters

Investigative reporters are journalists who gather facts to expose wrongdoing by powerful individuals and institutions. These journalists have also been called advocacy, adversarial, crusading, and public [Page 798]service reporters, or muckrakers. Like enterprise reporters, investigative journalists require more time than daily news reporters to produce their stories. But unlike enterprise journalists, the specific mission of investigative reporters is to uncover misconduct by those in authority—political, governmental, corporate, or religious.

Investigative reporters work in all forms of media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and online. They conduct research using interviews, documents, and personal observation, sometimes going “undercover” to witness events firsthand themselves.

Because their crusading brand of journalism can be expensive to produce and often generates costly lawsuits or angers powerful authorities from governments to advertisers, investigative reporters are relatively few in number. Yet they tend to be high-profile figures, often working in dangerous circumstances. Many investigative reporters around the world have been injured or killed in pursuit of their stories about wrongdoing. By providing a check on abuses by authorities, investigative reporters help protect democracy, mold public opinion, shape policy, deter wrongdoing, and reinforce society's key values.

The number of investigative reporters has waxed and waned over time. Exposé journalism tends to increase in periods of turmoil, such as the foment leading up to the American Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s, the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and upheavals during the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal of the 1960s and 1970s. New media technologies and journalistic competition have also spurred investigative reporters, such as the development of the penny press in the 1830s, mass market national magazines in the early 1900s, and the rise of broadcasting and digital media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Government censorship, more common in wartime, hampers investigative reporters; restrictive legislation such as the World War I Sedition Act of 1917, and its 1950 sequel during the McCarthy era, discouraged such critical journalism. In contrast, investigative reporters thrive during periods of free expression, such as that following the expansive 1964 Supreme Court ruling in the case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The number of investigative journalists in the United States reached an all-time high in the early twenty-first century when membership in the nonprofit group Investigative Reporters and Editors neared 5,000 journalists.

The earliest investigative reporters in America were partisan advocates, financed by political parties or ideological movements such as abolition or women's suffrage. But by the early twentieth century, most investigative reporters were employed by commercial media outlets and began to adopt a more objective style of storytelling. Investigative reporting was spurred by urbanization, increased literacy, and technological improvements in production, which made newspapers and magazines affordable to average consumers. As this journalism became economically profitable, publications ran exposés to increase circulation and began developing a broader concept of social responsibility to the community at large.

But while political parties no longer dictated coverage, advertisers sometimes did. Growing corporate ownership of media outlets sometimes discouraged investigative reporting out of timidity or a bottom-line focus on profit. Still, investigative reporters are a hardy breed and have persisted even in inhospitable climates.

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