Necessity’s decline

Investigative reporting

Twenty years ago, any larger-circulation newspaper with resources worth its journalistic salt employed investigative reporters or investigative teams to help fulfill its First Amendment responsibilities to readers and subscribers. This was practicing journalism as the First Amendment intended—to question those responsible for ensuring integrity and accountability in government and otherwise.

Such in-depth reporting helped prompt untold reforms by exposing all forms of wrongdoing and hypocrisy and holding our justice system accountable.

But investigative reporting requires resources. Newsrooms in general are considered the expense-generating department at every newspaper, yet they provide the product necessary for any credible publication to justify its value. The number of readers ultimately dictated the reasonable amount a paper could charge for advertising, which is the bread and butter of the industry.

Scratching beneath the surface was in my veins from the day I left the University of Central Arkansas in 1971 to become editor of the Newport Daily Independent. As my career expanded into Hot Springs, the Arkansas Democrat, Los Angeles Times, Chicago, Phoenix and beyond, my responsibilities largely became to dig for and report fullest possible truths through investigative reporting.

I learned how critical it was to check and double-check the sources of information I was sharing with readers who expected credibility. The location of the paper didn’t matter, only that the stories were pinned down tightly before they were circulated to our readers.

At annual national conferences, members of the Investigative Reporters and Editors association gathered to attend seminars and share techniques of fact-finding, as well as how to fulfill our responsibilities more effectively and professionally.

During those years, I adopted an editing process called the “line-byline” review. Whenever the reporting was completed and stories written, we would sit together and carefully read through each sentence, asking how we know every assertion to be true. Each fact needed to be tied to a valid source of information, whether it be from an interview or a document. When documents weren’t cited, multiple sources were necessary.

Yet as methodical and cautious as we were, an error invariably would find its way into some stories. Whenever that happened (we called that unfortunate circumstance a skinback) the policy was to correct it as soon as possible in the same space we’d erred. In other words, if it happened on page one, the correction appeared there too.

The embarrassment at having made a mistake was as painful as tearing one’s skin back, but it told our readers how sincerely we prized our credibility.

Sadly, economic pressures in recent years have decimated investigative teams and efforts across journalism.

Considered a luxury at most papers, the time and expense involved in thoroughly investigating a major issue made the practice expendable in many places.

That’s not to say news stories can’t still be enterprising, even investigative, in their nature and thrust. But economic hardship has forced the focus of even the nation’s once proudest investigative papers into severe contraction and survival mode.

Enter the danger to our democratic republic. Today, armed with laptops and social media accounts to circulate their often undocumented and/or uninformed views to thousands of “friends” they never will know, a massive army of journalistic wannabes with agendas is hard at work daily.

In that respect, social media can be a dangerous tool for freely assassinating people’s character and demonizing at will with distorted or nonexistent facts.

This alarming trend was best explained the other day in the cartoon strip Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis.

The initial panel says: “How good investigative reporting works.” In the next panel, a reporter asks a man, “Did you do it?” The man’s response: “I deny everything.”

Back at the newspaper, the reporter tells his editor, “He’s lying sir … he did it.” The editor retorts “Whoa, whoa … before we go rushing to judgment, let’s do the legwork on this.”

That’s followed by a panel showing reporters fanning out across the city, checking documents and talking with witnesses. Armed with the facts gathered, they confront the subject who sheepishly confesses: “Alright, alright. You got me! I did it!”

A second sign in the strip reads: “How social media works.” It begins with someone holding a phone asking another man, “Did you do it?” But before the man answer, he’s set ablaze with a flamethrower as the social media author shouts, “Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

“I haven’t even answered yet,” the scorched man protests as the social media author sprints away saying, “Sorry. On to the next thing.”

Rat in the following frame asks: “So who really needs reporters?” Goat responds, “We do.” Pig smiles, adding: “Insta-judgment is sooo much instant-er!”

And, with increasingly fewer exceptions, valued readers, that’s sadly pretty much where things stand nowadays for acquiring objective and credible information through genuine investigative reporting.