Journalism, generally, is a good thing. Its practitioners, ostensibly, seek to elucidate. When journalism is ‘investigative’, one can say that it goes further than ordinary journalism in bringing to light things which were previously obscured. Few would dispute these points, but agreement on the matter ends here; which is why pondering the question, ‘What happened to investigative journalism?’ is a worthwhile endeavour.

Investigating recent trends in the quality of investigative journalism (IJ) was Tessa Mayes, a practitioner of the art herself, at a Goodenough College ‘Port Talk’ in advance of the Battle of Ideas festival. Mayes, speaking to an audience of about 30 people, surveyed recent developments in the field, notably the reporting of scandals (and scandals in reporting), before suggesting a diagnosis: today’s IJ only reifies, rather than challenges, existing orthodoxies.

Speaking in the college’s Churchill Room -a dark, portrait-adorned, wood-panelled room that did not quite evoke the pace of contemporary digitised journalism - Mayes began with a concession. The content of IJ has always tended towards the sensationalist. The first instances of what we today call ‘investigative journalism’ in the late 17th century exposed either torture or sex scandals. Abu Ghraib or Mark Foley; we are all familiar with these themes.

So the problem today is not what is reported; this seems to have remained constant. While lamentable, the ‘content’ of recent scandals is not the negative trend alluded to in the title of the lecture. What Mayes took issue with was the increase, in military parlance, of ‘blue on blue’ incidents. The journalist’s weapon, the pen, was now all too often turned against their own profession. Mayes cited the Jason Blair fraud case, the Valerie Plame scandal (‘Plamegate’) and Iraq weapons ‘sexed-up’ dossier. While each case had its own intricacies, they all spurred investigations into the investigations. Now the reporters were being reported on. The consequence of all this is that now the onus is on journalists to reveal their sources.

This increased pressure to disclose all information weaned from interviews and investigations evinces a changing perception of journalists: where once they were intrepid (and objective) pursuers of ‘The Truth’, journalists are now conniving peddlers of rumour and slander, or at the very least, so seriously hampered by their biases as to be incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion.

To those not immersed in journalistic affairs, this was an interesting observation - something to ponder. The audience also appeared intrigued; at least they were nodding and not nodding-off. But, in the larger scheme of things, why did this matter? Indeed, why should we even subscribe to Mayes’ interpretation of ‘trends’? After all, the examples cited might just be isolated scandals that do not demonstrate much of anything. (The irony of writing a sceptical review of a lecture at which the speaker, an investigative journalist, laments public scepticism towards journalists’ objectivity, is not missed on the present writer.)

This point will be returned to below, but now we must turn to Mayes’ second observation. IJ concerns itself with a limited subject matter. This was addressed earlier: sex and torture, torture and sex. The ‘subject matter’ tends to be crimes and transgressions. Again, nothing new here. But where once a journalist’s reporting of a scandal would entail not only a dispassionate recounting of the events, but also a deeper social critique, today’s IJ works on the assumption of the ‘wrongness’ of the acts, without probing further into today’s laws and mores.

Mayes referred to headlines such as ‘Drugs companies lobbying revealed!’ and argued that stories like these only confirm a widely-held suspicion, or worse, just rehash an old story with a bit of new evidence. More importantly, Mayes continued, there is no subsequent inquiry into whether lobbying itself is wrong. Thus the ‘revelation’ is not threaded into a larger narrative about, for example, what lobbying means for democracy. The only story in the example used is that people are doing things that they should not. The moral of such a tale is merely an injunction not to break rules, whatever they may be. Mayes used recent reporting on the breaking of hate-speech laws as further example: instead of taking the initial transgression as a prompt to expose fundamental problems with such legislation, journalists today are content to merely expose the criminal and then volunteer the evidence to the police! As such, IJ today focuses on individual or bureaucratic wrongdoing and therefore merely reifies existing orthodoxies rather than challenges them.

Mayes’ passion for IJ cannot be questioned and she concluded by exhorting the audience to reinvigorate the pursuit of truth in journalism. Along the way, she also lamented the death of ‘campaigning journalism’ and cited George Monbiot - a man with whom she clearly holds no ideological affinity - as an example of someone who injects journalism with a sense of political purpose.

However, herein lies an apparent contradiction: in trying to hammer home the point that today’s investigative journalism only reifies orthodoxies, Mayes blurred the line between ‘campaigning’ journalism and the investigative sort - something the audience was not prepared to accept without challenge. To summate their critiques: how can one lament the decline in the belief in objectivity (a belief IJ relies upon) while simultaneously exhorting journalists to, essentially, be more political.

Clearly, one cannot be truly ‘objective’: in selecting facts, one betrays one’s own prejudices. Thus objectivity in journalism is an aspiration, not reality; but it is a necessary one. If one abandons the notion that journalists can be objective, then their pursuit of truth is a sham and can never be trusted. The whole IJ enterprise crumbles to the ground. So Mayes is correct in her first point: we need believe that journalists can be objective in their investigations, otherwise it is all rather meaningless.

However, she is also correct in her second point. In a time of political conformism, Mayes is rightly pushing for a more ‘critical’ journalism - one which seeks to expose contradictions in a system and not just point the finger at the transgressors. Exposing the breaking of a rule should serve as the ‘political moment’ - an opportunity to explore the fundamental political dynamics at work.

Mayes, however, missed her opportunity. After beginning with a confident exposition of the negative trends in IJ, Mayes did her own ideas a disservice. By muddling together the terms ‘investigative’ and ‘campaigning’ journalism, she obfuscated her (very valid) point about the decline of both. This can be excused as a dispute over definitions, and so her only fault was not explaining clearly enough what she meant by each term. One can dispassionately seek the truth, and then make use of it to demonstrate a broader political point. One can be both ‘investigative’ and ‘campaigning’ (though most seemed to dispute those terms). But Mayes also missed another opportunity.

Instead of seizing ‘the political moment’ by tying the decline in both investigative and campaigning journalism to broader social trends - respectively, the decline in the authority of experts and the end of ideology, Mayes sold herself short by merely providing the audience with a discussion of journalists not doing their job properly. In this respect, she was much like the journalist who exposes the people breaking the law, but not the problems with the law.

This talk was the first of a series of Port Talks in advance of the Battle of Ideas festival in London on 28-29 October 2006.