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Essay on Investigative Reporting is the Driving Force in Journalism

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Investigative reporting has been a driving force in journalism for centuries. The reporting tradition of revealing misconduct was already well established much before the 20th Century. Its practise even predates the publication of the first successful colonial newspaper in 1704, demonstrating the press’ watchdog role has had deep historical roots in democracy much prior to the 1960s. Over the past three centuries, investigative reporters have tried to make a difference by raising public consciousness about perceived wrongdoings. Prior to the early 1960s, investigative reporting was highly localised and sporadic. This was a reflection of the character of early journalism and the technological limits of communication. It was not until the …show more content…

The second was an exclusive by Sunday Times Insight, whose reporter Ron Hall detailed the methods used by a criminal landlord, Peter Rachman, to terrorise tenants. These examples set a trend and by the late 1960s there were many new vehicles for investigative reporting in the national media.
One of the most notable reporters of the time was Ron Hall, who has been considered to have virtually invented the art of investigative journalism in Britain, as one of a trio of young reporters in the 1960s, he created the insight team of the Sunday Times. Shortly after he joined the paper, the scandal of the Profumo affair broke so he began to produce a weekly detailed account of what had happened, digging deeper into the background story. Shortly after that, the first truly investigative article written by Hall was an account of the life and misdeeds of Rachman, the corrupt slum landlord. In the course of his 20 years on the paper, he was associated with some of its most important investigative stories, including the Philby spy scandal, thalidomide, and the remarkable disclosure that the yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, who had taken part in a round-the-world race, and had faked his journey, pretending to have orbited the globe. Ron Hall was one of the most influential and talented journalists of his time, an architect of the Sunday Times Insight pages and pioneered techniques of investigative journalism that altered the nature of much of the

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