Investigative Reporting

A study in technique

David Spark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136029455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

This important book defines what investigative reporting is and what qualities it requires. Drawing on the experience of many well-known journalists in the field, the author identifies the skills, common factors and special circumstances involved in a wide variety of investigations. It examines how opportunities for investigations can be found and pursued, how informants can be persuaded to yield needed information and how and where this information can be checked. It also stresses the dangers and legal constraints that have to be contended with and shows real life examples such as the Cook Report formula, the Jonathan Aitken investigation and the Birmingham Six story. David Spark, himself a freelance writer of wide experience, examines how opportunities for investigations can be found and pursued, how informants can be persuaded to yield needed information and how and where this information can be checked. He also stresses the dangers and legal constraints that have to be contended with and shows investigators at work in two classic inquiries:
· The mysterious weekend spent in Paris by Jonathan Aitken, then Minister of Defence Procurement
· The career of masterspy Kim PhilbyInvestigative Reporting looks at such fields for inquiry as company frauds (including those of Robert Maxwell), consumer complaints, crime, police malpractice, the intelligence services, local government and corruption in Parliament and in overseas and international bodies.The author believes that the conclusions that emerge from this far-reaching survey are of value not only in investigative journalism, but to practitioners in all branches of reporting.

1 What is investigative reporting?

ESTABLISHING THE FACTS

In only nine paragraphs, a correspondent told in The Times in October 1997 how three named retail groups had secretly helped fund an alliance campaigning to stop Sainsbury’s building a store in North London. To corroborate the allegation, the correspondent had a document from the Stop the Store Alliance, plus admissions from all three groups. Here was a neat demonstration of investigative journalism, not only making an allegation but producing conclusive evidence and reporting it clearly and simply.

It is worth considering how the story might have run if there had been no document from the alliance. If run at all, it would probably have been an allegation-and-denial story, leaving readers to decide who to believe. Allegation-and-denial stories are quite attractive for newspapers. They enable complaints to be aired while saving time on research and minimizing the risk of a libel action, provided a good deal of space is given to the denial.

Investigative reporting goes beyond allegation and denial to establish facts which, if possible, decide the issue one way or the other.

A heated meeting at Portsmouth University in 1994 produced a range of allegations. Geoff Elliott, editor of the local evening paper, The News, asked his education reporter, David Charter, to establish some facts.

As a result, The News reported with documentary evidence that the university’s then vice-chancellor, Neil Merritt, had exploited a concession concerning travel expenses on visits to Egypt and Malaysia. The concession was that, instead of travelling club class, as he was entitled to do, he could buy two economy class tickets for himself and his wife.

He accordingly bought economy tickets to Egypt and Malaysia but he claimed on expenses for a club class ticket for each journey. He drove to Heathrow to buy, claim for as expenses and later return, club class tickets costing £1,457 more than he paid for the economy tickets he actually used. The vice-chancellor, speaking to staff, admitted errors of judgement and said he had declared the £1,457 surplus as taxable income. After The News’s report, he resigned.

Investigative reporting is thus not impartially balanced between allegation and reply. It expresses a judgement based on the facts unearthed. (Though the collection and presentation of evidence must be even-handed, not slanted, and reporters must be prepared to revise their judgement in the light of the facts.)

Tony Collins, investigative reporter at Computer Weekly, says: ‘A lot of graduates come out of university with the feeling that journalism is about sitting in the middle of issues.’

But Roger Cook said of his Checkpoint radio programme, predecessor of The Cook Report: ‘This is and always will be a biased programme.’ It was biased, he said, against fraud, criminality and injustice.

Checkpoint was revolutionary for the BBC. Instead of standing back with traditional impartiality, the BBC was looking into complaints and taking up the cudgels on someone’s behalf.

Many journalists would argue this is no big deal.

Bruce Page, who worked on the thalidomide, Philby and DC-10 airliner stories for the Insight team at The Sunday Times, argues that all reporters should do what so-called investigative reporters do: check facts, never take anything on trust, never take anything on trust from people who have an interest in pushing a particular view.

Investigation, he says, is what journalism is about. What makes the contents of a newspaper different from those of an advertising brochure is that they say something which the newspaper staff have discovered by their own efforts. Journalism is not about asking important people what happened. It is about finding out yourself. Page feels it is dangerous to saw this off from the rest of reporting and call it investigation. There is nothing called investigative journalism, in his view, which is not just journalism as he learned it at the Melbourne Herald.

In an article in the British Journalism Review in September 1998 he calls this low journalism, as opposed to the high journalism expounded by Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph.

Moore wrote in The Guardian in April 1997 that he admired much of The Guardian’s work over corruption but there was a higher aspiration: to tell people the news and interpret it in a way they found interesting, honest and helpful.

Bruce Page replied in his article that reporting the news is higher than investigation only in the sense that a building is higher than its foundations. Investigative technique is the foundation on which everything in journalism rests.

NEWS: THE HIDDEN AREAS

What is the news? Is it what people say it is or are there hidden facts? Bruce Page writes that sources of news may be corrupt, so the evidence behind a news story must be critically analysed. Reporters should not simply be a conduit for material shaped by others.

Tom Bower, in the introduction to his book Maxwell: The Final Verdict (Heinemann/Mandarin, 1993), writes of proper journalism as opposed to straightforward reporting or the columnists’ self-righteous sermonizing.

Michael Gillard of The Express says: ‘Clever men hire public relations people to plant stories and they pay lawyers to threaten those who don’t believe them. Companies and individuals put out PR fronts about who they are. Most papers are only too happy to accept that. But let’s go and find out.’

Inside Fraud Bulletin and other organizations held a seminar in October 1998 with the title Finding the Truth. The brochure carried the slogan: ‘A lie is the truth to people who don’t know better.’

The brochure critically analysed a statement by President Bill Clinton that ‘there is not a single solitary shred of evidence of anything dishonest in my public life’.

The brochure commented: ‘Most people hearing this would understand it to be a total denial of wrongdoing and Mr Clinton clearly intended this to be so. However, more careful reading shows that Mr Clinton did not deny acting dishonestly: merely that there was no evidence of it. His further qualification concerning dishonesty in his public life suggests that the denial did not apply to his private life.’

The Finding the Truth seminar’s subjects included ‘Spotting the Conman’, ‘Strategies for Interviewing’ and ‘Lies in Writing’. These are all important to journalists.

David Murphy in his book The Stalker Affair and the Press (Unwin Hyman, 1991) draws a useful distinction. While the bulk of reporting depends on official occasions and spokesmen, some depends on unofficial people. He gives an example.

A general had been questioned about alleged shoplifting at Woolworths. An officer, incensed that this was apparently being hushed up, rang a freelance who approached the Manchester office of The Mirror. A reporter mentioned this to a friendly senior policeman who was able to name the general and the store. The police officer’s contact in the Ministry of Defence confirmed the story, anonymously, and gave more details. (Note that, because the confirmation was anonymous, it was not sufficient.)

Army and police spokesmen denied everything, but a London reporter got the exact location of the store from the Ministry of Defence contact, and the police finally confirmed that an incident had taken place. So a story could be published.

GENERAL, SPECIALIST AND INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING

This book will use the phrase ‘investigative reporting’ to refer to this kind of work. The dispute being investigated need not be between an unofficial complainant and an official body. It could be between two organizations. It might concern a long sequence of events, even a whole lifetime. The point is that journalists pursue the matter beyond allegation and reply. They seek to prove or disprove the allegation.

David Murphy points out that three levels of reporting can be discerned. At the passive level, reporters report public events and what is said there. At the next level, they seek 10 explain or interpret what is said. At the third level, they look tor the evidence behind it. To put it another way, reporting can be general, specialist or investigative.

General reporters usually lack detailed knowledge of the subject they are reporting on. They are in a hurry. They work on stories chosen by their news desk from an agenda set by major news sources and media (local or national). They seek quotes from spokesmen: managing directors, police superintendents, public relations officers, secretaries of organizations and pressure groups.

Murphy says that this serves a dual purpose for the newspaper. It shows news reports to be relevant to the society of which readers are part. It also vouches for their accuracy. If the managing director says it, it must be right. General reporting thus bolsters the managing director and the police superintendent as authoritative figures in society.

Specialist reporters, for their part, have a detailed knowledge of their subject and seek to explain it. Like general reporters, they are expected to file stories regularly. To achieve this, they have contacts in their subject area, to whom they speak frequently. They know who to approach for information. Their specialist knowledge gives them their own perspective on events and on the people in the news. They receive good information because they are knowledgeable people worth offering it to.

A third group, reporters with an investigative turn of mind, may be either generalists or specialists. Whichever they are, they are prepared to listen to non-spokesmen. They don’t take the managing director’s or the pundit’s or the contact’s word for everything.

In particular, they listen to non-spokesmen saying things which spokesmen wouldn’t want to admit. They step outside the routine news agenda. (And this is one of their problems. News editors, struggling with today’s news, say: Why can’t it wait till next week?)

Such reporters are interested not in what people say about themselves but in what other people say about them. They seek to see behind the public face of organizations. They are in less of a hurry than most reporters. They make time to build up a detailed knowledge of the subject they are studying.

While most general and specialist reporting bolsters established authority and organizations, albeit including unorthodox groups, investigative reporting often subverts them. General reporting accepts the chairman of whatever as reputable and likely to be right. Investigative reporting pursues the whisper that he could be wrong.

Investigative reporting seeks to gather facts which someone wants suppressed. It seeks not just the obvious informants who will be uncontroversial, or economical with the truth, but the less obvious who know, about disturbing secrets and are angry or disturbed enough to divulge them.

FIGHTING READERS’ BATTLES

Reporters keen on investigative work side with the less powerful and the forgotten. Carol Sarlar wrote in the Sunday Times Magazine about a woman who lost her home and her peace of mind because she gave evidence against five boys who killed another lad. Daniel McGrory wrote in The Times about forgotten Britons, unfairly imprisoned abroad and still in jail while higher-profile prisoners have been released. ‘Our job,’ says Claudia Milne of the TV programme maker Twenty Twenty Television, ‘is to raise things which people in power find uncomfortable.’

Investigative reporting has also been described as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

The investigative journalists of the 1970s were mainly on the political Left, though they annoyed the Left by exposing corruption in Labour council leaderships (see pages 208–12). They had been involved in the revolutionary politics of the 1960s. They wanted to expose the secrets of the Establishment. They wanted a more moral Britain and they wanted to use the power of the media to shift things in the right direction.

Fulcrum Productions, which contributes to Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, takes its name from a boast of Archimedes, that with a lever, a fulcrum and a place to stand he could shift anything.

There are other motivations. Ian Dowell, editor of the Evening Mail, Birmingham, thinks campaigns and investigations are essential if his paper is to stay in business:

‘We are often beaten on news breaks by local radio, local TV, satellites, the Internet. Our salvation will be that we fight our readers’ battles. If they’re worried about the closure of a school or factory or about pollution, we should be there. With a large staff, we can afford to have two or three people on investigations.

‘We have most success when the public are on our side.’

The News at Portsmouth also has a reporter working much of the time on investigations. The editor, Geoff Elliott, says: ‘It brings great credit on a paper if it’s seen to be doing something no one else is doing. People like their newspaper to be the means by which what is really happening is exposed.’

Chris White of The Parliament Magazine in Brussels says: ‘The job is first to expose and get a good story and, second, to keep the public informed and let people know of the dangers th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustration
• Preface
• 1. What is investigative reporting?
• 2. The making of an investigative reporter
• 3. Insight and the development of techniques
• 4. Finding the stories
• 5. Pursuing inquiries: Doing it right
• 6. Pursuing inquiries: Getting it right
• 7. Finding the people
• 8. Dealing with documents
• 9. Getting people to talk
• 10. Writing it: Problems and pitfalls
• 11. Two classic investigations
• 12. Looking into companies
• 13. The Maxwell investigations
• 14. Social and consumer affairs
• 15. Crime
• 16. Trail of the bent coppers
• 17. Security and intelligence
• 18. Investigating local government
• 19. Sleaze
• 20. Cruelty and corruption abroad
• Appendix A. Books for further reading
• Appendix B. People who helped with this book
• Appendix C. Council information open to public view
• Appendix D. Press Complaints Commission – Code of Practice
• Index