INVESTIGATIONS: "J'Accuse! - We name the guilty men! "

Notes by Chris Horrie

"Investigative journalism" is a huge subject which will, in due course, be dealt with in a related INVESTIGATIVE WEB related to this site.

Basically all it means that the journalist has initiated the story - as oppose to the normal method of simply following what is happening in the courts, council, parliament, scheduled meetings (etc - the news agenda) or responding to some unscheduled disaster or crisis.

It therefore overlaps with GONZO journalism. The original humdinger investigative piece J'ACCUSE! was initiated by the writer and journalist Emile Zola. He formed the view that the French army officer Dreyfus (sent to Devil's Island had been scapegoated and framed. he went over the court case and proved this was the case, got Dreyfus out of jail and caused the Government to fall and the French state to be modernised and reformed.

In more recent times the Washington Post team of Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Nixon Watergate scandal. Granada's World in Action TV show (now defunct) managed to get the framed "Birmingham Six" out of jail.

The most common types of investigative pieces  involve reviewing miscarriages of justice; exposing consumer rip-offs and working, generally, with the police when they can't get a conviction. There is a legal dimension to all this which we will discuss as part of the law module.

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