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By highlighting eight investigative stories that are of modern-classic status in China, this book offers a tribute to the Chinese men and women who have kept their faith in the art of truth-telling and investigative reporting intact in spite of great personal sacrifices and hardships. They have pushed their luck, on paths fraught with setbacks and disappointments. This book is about them, their hopes and desires in the ever-evolving, brave new world of Chinese journalism. In telling their stories, this book also explores the limitations and fragile state of Chinese journalism today.

Within a larger cultural exchange of information, investigative documentary makers balance creative artistry with journalistic practices while they navigate risk and security concerns in precarious times, and they play a vital role in democratic functioning by fostering public awareness and dialogue. These investigative documentarians are breaking new stories even as they face threats—legal, privacy, security, safety—that may be more profound given their location outside formal journalism institutions. Opening with the story of CitizenFour, Laura Poitras’s Academy Award–winning exposé of US National Security Agency spying through the story of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the film case studies here also include Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, the documentary investigation of four lesbians wrongfully convicted of a heinous crime; and The Feeling of Being Watched, a first-person verité journey into government spying on the filmmaker’s predominantly Arab-American community outside Chicago.

This chapter explores the specific steps needed for business journalism to evolve to serve a broader audience. These steps include using the tools and techniques of trade-press reporters to examine businesses and hold them accountable while targeting a more general readership. The chapter describes a market for accountability business journalism where some media owners who value the public-service mission of journalism were also able to make money. The chapter describes how newsroom culture, ownership structure, business model, and in-depth focus on an industry are items that can help transform production of business journalism so that it serves the public interest. A focus on investigative journalism and collaboration with other news organizations are also central to this evolution.

The National Thrift News first reported in September 1987 about the infamous Keating Five meeting where five U.S. Senators sought to weaken a regulatory examination of a troubled savings and loan owned by the politically powerful Charles Keating Jr. The newspaper’s coverage of this event, which became central to the cultural memory of the savings-and-loan crisis, initially was ignored by major media. It speaks to a broader failure of conventional business journalism, which is summarized here through a review of business journalism history and normative practices. A common thread in this criticism is business journalists’ lack of independence from the business and markets they cover. This chapter argues that the trade press performs a valuable surveillance function of industry.

This chapter examines the development of investigative journalism from the early 1970s onwards. It looks at the ground-breaking Sweepstakes éxpose of 1973, how the early investigations into corruption in local government were frustrated, and the infamous Heavy Gang investigation into police brutality by the Irish Times. It also looks extensively at how a new generation of journalists sought to instil transparency and accountability into Irish public life through the development of periodicals such as Hibernia, Magill, Hot Press and In Dublin. In time the journalists who cut their teeth on these periodicals would migrate to mainstream media – bringing their investigative zeal with them.

This chapter discusses the ethics and the type of research conducted by an investigative journalist. It discusses the convergence and divergence of academics research and investigative journalism from the context of ethics and ethical research. Discussions in this chapter include: interviewing participants; people and stories; the politics of journalism; power and the editor; copy approval; moral responsibility and sensitivity; payment; and aftercare and professional boundaries.

The life of veteran financial journalist Stan Strachan and his newspaper, the National Thrift News both traced the broader arc of the savings-and-loan industry from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s; the industry prospered due to a post-World War II housing boom but foundered in the mid-1970s as a result of regulatory strictures and rising inflation; federal deregulatory policies used to revive the industry backfired, triggering the collapse of thousands of thrifts. The roots of Strachan’s traditional journalistic training and idealization of U.S. society were central to his reputation for journalistic independence. He used his close contact with the industry to advance the newspaper’s journalism; insider knowledge allowed reporters to break important stories.

Drawing on the results of an extensive questionnaire of European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs), this chapter explores these regulators’ substantive orientation and detailed approach to standard-setting in the area of professional journalism under the Data Protection Directive. As regards news production, a large majority of DPAs accepted that the special expressive purposes derogation was engaged. Notwithstanding a greater emphasis on an internal balancing of rights within default data protection norms, this also remained the plurality view also as regards news archives. Detailed standard-setting was explored through hypothetical scenarios relating to undercover investigative journalism and data subject access demands made of journalists. It was found that, notwithstanding conflicts in many cases with statutory transparency and sensitive data provisions, all DPAs accepted the essential legitimacy of undercover journalism and over one-third only required that such activity conform to a permissive public interest test that didn’t explicitly incorporate a necessity threshold. In contrast, a much stricter approach was taken to the articulation of standards relating to subject access, with over one-third arguing that, aside from protecting information relating to sources, journalists would be obliged to comply with the default rules here in full. This difference may be linked to the divergent treatment of these issues within self-regulatory media codes: whilst almost all set down general ‘ethical’ norms applicable to undercover journalism, almost none did so as regards subject access. Despite the general tendency to ‘read down’ statutory provisions relating to undercover journalism, the severity of a DPAs’ approach to each scenario remained strongly correlated with the stringency of local law applicable to journalism.

Like Donald Trump, Keating used his economic power to intimidate reporters and regulators with lawsuits as he pursued his business expansion; Keating and Trump parallels are discussed. The fight between Keating and the press points to a broader tension between capitalism and the press, a central theme in the book. Keating’s lawsuits and legal threats are examined with new archival material from American Continental Corporation Archives and a Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA request. The chapter shows how early mainstream press coverage missed signs about Keating’s political manipulation of the regulatory process. It also shows how National Thrift News engaged in detailed beat reporting where the New York Times, American Banker, and the Wall Street Journal did not.

This chapter provides a case study and content analysis of how mainstream business journalism failed to report on the Keating Five meeting, a significant event that foreshadowed the failure Lincoln Savings and Loan. National Thrift News coverage is compared to that of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, American Banker, and the Associated Press. The study finds how National Thrift News was first to report on the Keating Five meeting even though the story was available to other news organizations. News coverage following the collapse of Lincoln Savings shows a pack journalism mindset.

This chapter examines the seemingly unending revelations of political, religious, and financial corruption that dominated the 1990s. It surveys the banking and policing scandals that dominated this decade and examines the struggles that journalists engaged in to expose this corruption. It also devotes considerable attention to the church scandals that were finally exposed by journalists – in particular the child abuse scandal that was to change forever the relationship between the once all-powerful Catholic Church and journalism.

This chapter examines the relationship that existed between journalists and Charles Haughey. It outlines the telephone tapping controversy of the early 1980s – during which the telephones of several journalists were tapped by the government – and how numerous journalists sought to varying degrees of success to investigate the source of Haughey’s wealth and the corruption then endemic in Irish public life. It looks at how the concerted efforts by Haughey and his supporters to frustrate journalistic inquiry created an atmosphere of fear and risk avoidance on the part of media organisation during the 1980s.

In this essay, Joanne Shattock discusses Margaret Oliphant’s mid-century work at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside the work of two lesser-known journalists: Mary Howitt (1799–1888) and Eliza Meteyard (1816–79). All three contributed copy to ‘mainstream publications on a range of subjects far beyond those often assumed to be the preserve of women journalists in the period,’ with each woman also making her own distinctive contribution to Victorian journalism: Howitt as an editor, Meteyard as a pioneering figure in the nascent field of investigative journalism, and Oliphant as one of the most prolific reviewers of the period (p. 303). Shattock’s analysis of their careers demonstrates the productive and individuated ways in which female journalists carved out a space for their work and their voices in the masculine sphere of journalism.

In his essay, “Speculative Ecology: Rachel Carson’s Environmentalist Documentaries,” Daniel Worden argues that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is not only a path-breaking work of investigative journalism, but also a daring work of imaginative projection. Rereading this seminal book in light of Carson’s earlier writing about the ocean, which she portrays as vast and indecipherable, Worden reinterprets Carson’s storied career and demonstrates her contribution to contemporary writing about climate change. Tasked with describing catastrophe that unfolds incrementally, Carson’s speculative documentary defamiliarizes nature itself, performing the work of estrangement that survival may require.

Tehelka.com's exposé of bribery and corruption in military deals in India led to the resignation of George Fernandes as defence minister, and prompted others implicated in the scandal to cry 'ethics'. The case indeed has ethical implications and raises several pertinent questions: Can a journalist seeking an interview still be trusted? What are the circumstances that will justify subterfuge in the course of a journalist's work? What constitutes public interest? Who will police this scandal? Investigative journalism is certainly not the same as a press interview. The tehelka.com case has a precedent that bears directly on it, and is fully covered in a ruling by the British Press Complaints Commission. The Commission is not a statutory body, but rather a full self-regulatory body tasked to uphold and enforce a code of conduct formulated by journalists themselves.

This final chapter examines the figuration of the CIA in the wave of paranoid conspiracy films that were made in the 1970s. Still suffering from the reverberations of Watergate and the Vietnam War, in 1975 America faced another season of scandal after the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of damning revelations of nefarious CIA and FBI activities in the New York Times. This compounded a culture of suspicion that had already set in, especially in Hollywood, by the beginning of the 1970s. The conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, films like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, were the polar opposite of the semi-documentary films that represented American espionage in the aftermath of the Second World War. Whilst the latter lauded the United States government as the arbiter of historical authenticity, the former perceived state secrecy and deception as nefarious obstacles that prevented citizens from knowing the truth of their history. Secrecy figures as history’s aporia, and few types of film express this better than the paranoid conspiracy thriller.

John Poulson’s file for bankruptcy in 1972 exposed a range of corrupt practices involving not only Poulson but also T. Dan Smith the Newcastle politician as well as a range of civil servants, public health officials, railway surveyors and trade union officials. His subsequent trial also resulted in the resignation of the Home Secretary. Poulson’s bribes disguised as gifts and Smith’s public relations companies which employed local councillors were front organisations to conceal payments and retainers thus enabling councillors to vote planning applications without declaring their interests. The consequences were immense resulting in a Royal Commission Report in 1976. Newspaper reports also displayed a new kind of investigative journalism that went beyond sensationalism. Television documentaries and radio phone-ins showed how new forms of technology could expose corruption to wider sections of the population. Both Poulson and Smith served prison sentences and their trials served to discredit local government fundamentally providing impetus for the governments of Margaret Thatcher to launch a major assault on the powers and range of local government