Legacy and Break through: A brief review of invest...
李 颖 [1]
It’s hard to arrive at a unanimously accepted definition for investigative journalism. Steve Weinberg, journalism professor from University of M issouri,def ined investigative journalism as “The reporting, through one’s own initiative and work product, matters of importance to readers, viewers, or listeners.” (Weinberg,1996) This is a rather generic def inition, emphasizing the endeavor’s contribution to public interest through self-motivation and diligence.
Hugo de Burgh（de Burgh, 2000）states that: “An investigative journalist is a man or woman whose profession it is to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available. The act of doing this generally is called investigative journalism.” This definition highlights. the paramount pursuit of the practice in uncovering the unknown and exposing w rong-doings, eclipsing other forms of news content.
This point is further expanded by UNESCO. In its manual for investigative journalism (Hunter and Lee, M 2011), the UN agency describes the process as “exposing to the public matters that are concealed - either deliberately by someone in a position of power, or accidentally, behind a chaotic mass of facts and circumstances that obscure understanding.” This definition draws attention to the indispensable role of methodology in revealing the core message from a vast cache of entangled raw materials w ith no apparent order or logic connections.(https://www.daowen.com)
Def initions may vary. Journalism practitioners tent to agree that investigative reporting is an extremely demanding, time-consum ing, exact and even onerous process that pushes the journalists to demonstrate the supreme caliber of professionalism.
It’s fair to say the purpose of investigative journalism is to produce any stories necessitating further information to reveal concealed truths, and present hard facts unavailable to the public due to technical constraints and inaccessible information.Such projects involve the collection of complicated factors or elements crucial to the identification and understanding of a structural problem. In this sense, investigative journalism aims at tackling issues w ith huge impacts on public interests, unrestricted by the norm and daily routines of typical news production cycles centering on news updates.
The differences between conventional news reports and investigative reports can be summarized along the follow ing lines.