Quotes & Sayings About Investigative Reporting

One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary - perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting - where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate NGOs to advocate on their causes. — Evgeny Morozov

Cherchez la femme" is good advice for investigative reporters. "Follow the money" is even better advice. — Ben Bradlee

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers. — Stanley Crouch

In this very uncertain time for the media, serious investigative reporting - the expensive, time-consuming stuff - is under enormous pressure at newspapers and other commercial news organizations. Non-profits such as the Center for Public Integrity are taking on this vital work and without them the prospects for investigative reporting would be even more dire. The Center has been properly celebrated for its careful, rigorous work, and to my mind it has now ascended to the status of national treasure. — Alex Jones

In college, I wanted to be Perry Mason, the hottest defense lawyer around. Then I realized that defense lawyers represented the scum of the earth, and most of their clients were guilty. Kinda blew the image for me. In my sophomore year, I took a journalism course and was hooked. I discovered investigative reporting, and soon realized I could be judge, jury, and prosecutor. So who needed to be a lawyer — Rick Pullen

My understanding from talking to a lot of people in the business has been that it used to be that a newspaper was considered a community service. Now they're being run as profit centers, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem. — Craig Newmark

It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs. — Tina Brown

There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening. — Sarah Stillman

I think people ought to realize that if you're doing investigative reporting, you're putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe. — Mark Ruffalo

The thing that's been inhibiting long-form investigative reporting is fear - fear of being sued, of being unpopular, of being criticized by very powerful groups. — Eric Schlosser

Journalism is a great profession. It's complicated now. People talk about the demise of investigative reporting. I was a judge in some award contest recently, and the stuff that is being done by major newspapers, and local, regional papers around the country, is great. Newspapers play an amazing role in our society, and I still think they are important. I'm sorry newspaper circulation is down. Ultimately, the importance of newspapers can't be replaced. — Seymour Hersh

I always knew I wanted to write, but I didn't know that I would want to do investigative reporting - in part because it seemed so ill-suited for my personality, or I thought it was ill-suited for my personality, insofar as I'm not very aggressive, and I'm not confrontational. — Sarah Stillman

Independent documentary isn't beholden to some of the interests that the mainstream media are influenced by. It's a pathway to renegade, independent reporting in an in-depth, investigative fashion, and it can do so with a compassionate lens; it allows people to speak in a way that is more human than the mainstream media approach. — Josh Fox

Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity's constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy — Alma Guillermoprieto