Faux Investigations

In the ebb and flow of the watchdog role over the last two centuries, we are reaching a moment of diminution by dilution. The celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein was followed by the success of 60 Minutes, in which correspondents Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner and Ed Bradley became stars in their own reports. People tuned in to see who Mike, Morley, Harry, and Ed would catch this week.

Investigative journalism, particularly on television, thus became a means both for public good and for commercial ratings. In the nearly thirty years since, the proliferation of outlets for news and information has been accompanied by a torrent of investigative reportage. With most local news stations in America now featuring an "I-team" and prime-time newsmagazines offering the promise of nightly exposes, we have created a permanent infrastructure of news devoted to exposure.

Much of this reportage has the earmarks of watchdog reporting, but there is a difference. Most of these programs do not monitor the powerful elite and guard against the potential for tyrannical abuse. Rather, they tend to concern risks to personal safety or one's pocket- book. Among some popular topics of prime-time magazines: crooked car mechanics, poor swimming pool lifeguarding, sex slave rings, housecleaning scams, dangerous teenage drivers.

A study of prime-time newsmagazines in 1997, for instance, reveals a genre of investigative reporting that ignores most of the matters typically associated with the watchdog role of the press. Fewer than one in ten stories on these programs concerned the combined topics of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics, or social welfare -or any of the areas where most public money is spent. More than half the stories, rather, focused on lifestyle, behavior, consumerism, health, or celebrity entertainment. Victor Neufeld, then executive producer of ABC's 20/20, told the committee, "Our obligation is not to deliver the news. Our obligation is to do good programming."

Safety can often be an important target for intense and critical watchdog reporting. Yet too much of the new "investigative" reporting is tabloid treatment of everyday circumstances. Local television news often employs its 1-teams in such stories as "dangerous doors"- reporting on the hazards of opening and closing doors; or "inside your washing machine" -a look at how dirt and bacteria on the clothes consumers put in their washers get on other clothes. Consider the Los Angeles TV station that rented a house for two months and wired it with a raft of hidden cameras to expose that you really can't get all the carpeting in your house cleaned for $7.95. Or the series of reports, popular in the mid-1990s, about a bra whose metal wires could poke the owner.

While this reporting appears to be original investigative work, it often is not. First, much of it is what TV reporter Liz Leamy calls "just water" investigative reports. These come from TV news consultants who literally offer stations the scripts, the shots, the experts to interview or the interviews themselves already on tape, and are specifically designed for sweeps periods to generate ratings. Some TV news producers call such expos6s "stunting," an acknowledgment that they are playing tricks with viewers' appreciation of investigative work with- out actually delivering it. The second problem is that exposing what is readily understood or simply common sense belittles investigative journalism. The press becomes the boy who cried wolf. It is squandering its ability to demand the public's attention because it has done so too many times about trivial matters. It is turning watchdogism into a form of amusement.

The significance of this shift should not be underestimated. On television, the primary medium for news, the prime-time magazine and I-team segment have effectively replaced the documentary or any other long-form investigative reportage. As a consequence, some journalists are beginning to question the expanded role of investigative journalism. Patty Calhoun, editor of Westword, an alternative newspaper in Denver, Colorado, wondered about the impact on a public that had no way of discerning between gossip and fact when she observed: "talk radio ... puts out rumors and now thinks they're doing investigative reporting which is novel, but unfortunately, their listeners can't tell any better than the radio DJs that they're not."

Even the broad public support for watchdog reporting is beginning to suffer, though it is difficult to pinpoint trivial expos6s as the cause. Public concern seems to focus on the standards and techniques used by some investigative reporters. For years, the survey work of Andrew Kohut for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found public support of the watchdog role remaining stable while the press in general began to become unpopular in the 1990s. But by the end of the decade, even that began to change. By 1997, Kohut found the public objecting to techniques such as having reporters not identify them- selves as reporters, paying informers for information, or using hidden cameras or microphones's The same survey found a strong majority (80 percent) who "in general ... approve of the news media's practice, of uncovering and reporting on corruption and fraud in business, government agencies and other organizations." Yet by 1999 Kohut found 38 percent of the American people believe news organizations "hurt democracy." The same number of Americans said they believed news organizations were "immoral."

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