Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Investigative journalism is a primary source of information. Most investigative journalism is conducted by newspapers, wire services, and freelance journalists. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog journalism" or "accountability reporting." Seymour Hersh's stories on the My Lai massacre were distributed by the Dispatch News Service during the Vietnam War and won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970; in 2004, Hersh reported for The New Yorker on torture inside the Abu Ghraib prison by members of a military police unit of the U.S. Army Reserve during the Iraq War Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting on the Watergate break-in and other Nixon administration-related crimes for The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973 Mark Dowie and Carolyn Marshall's 1977 Mother Jones investigation of fatal dangers in the Ford Pinto automobile John Pilger, an Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker, collaborated with filmmaker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper on the impact of the Khmer Rouge on the Cambodian people in a report for the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the documentary Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) for Associated Television; this was followed a year later by Cambodia: Year One; both documentaries won United Nations Media Peace Prizes After Year Zero, funds were raised in support of Cambodia Bill Dedman's 1988 investigation, The Color of Money,[4] for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on racial discrimination by mortgage lenders in middle-income neighborhoods, received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and was an influential early example of computer-assisted reporting or database journalism Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's two-year investigation for The Philadelphia Inquirer into the deterioration of the U.S. middle class that was then released as the 1992 book America What Went Wrong? Turkish journalist Uğur Mumcu of Cumhuriyet had been involved in several high profile and sensitive investigations before his murder in 1993, such as the Kurdish Worker's Party's ties to intelligence, Iranian support for the Kurdish Hezbollah, and even the background of Pope John Paul II's assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca Veronica Guerin of Ireland combined her accounting and journalism skills to expose drug dealers for the Sunday Independent and Irish Independent before she was murdered in 1996; after her death, Ireland established the Criminal Assets Bureau to investigate organized crime James Risen and Eric Lichtblau's investigation for The New York Times into U.S. President George W. Bush Administration's handling of secret domestic eavesdropping; their report in December 2005 first made public the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy Anna Politkovskaya's reporting in Chechnya and on the Russian treatment of the Chechen people led to many investigative reports published in Novaya Gazeta, such as the poisoning of children; her work was widely recognized by international organizations before she was murdered in 2006; today an award in her name honors other women who report under circumstances of great danger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism Image By Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) (http://www.rawa.org/) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 07 Nov 2013
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