The hardscrabble roots of investigative journalism
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By Floyd J. McKay / guest columnist
The Seattle Times
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Mark Felt's decision to reveal himself as "Deep Throat," the mysterious and knowing insider who helped The Washington Post uncover Watergate three decades ago, was a real boost to serious reporters, who seem to be under constant fire these days.
Had Felt taken his secret to the grave — Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein promised they would protect him while he lived — there would always be some who would maintain that there was no anonymous inside source. Now we know that he was what "Woodstein" said he was, a top-level source in a position to know.
Watergate initiated a wave of eager young men and women wanting to be famous investigative reporters. Some became very good at the craft, others failed in the difficult work. It was a heady time to be a reporter, a time when the American public still held reporters in high regard, and "press" had yet to be replaced by the all-encompassing "media."
Where is the craft 30 years later? Well, it depends upon where you look.
Investigative reporting is practiced, and practiced well, at a handful of major newspapers and magazines. Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the Mai Lai massacre in 1969, revealed the Abu Ghraib scandal 35 years later for The New Yorker.
There is no shortage of nominations for Pulitzer Prizes in the category of investigative reporting, but times have changed since Watergate.
In the past 20 years, 40 different newspapers have been named finalists for Pulitzers for investigative reporting. The seeds of the Watergate era were widely scattered.
But increasingly, the prizes are concentrated among a few large newspapers, the agenda-setters. The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have 47 percent (9 of 19) of the finalist spots since 2000. Between 1985 and 2000, their share was only 13 percent. (The Seattle Times is one of only four papers to be named a finalist at least three times since 1985.)
It is not just that winning papers, like winning baseball teams, attract the best in the field — although they do. But, like winning ball teams, these papers are willing to spend reporting time and money. The cost of uncovering a big story can be stupendous, often involving lawyers and computer experts as well as reporters, photographers and editors.
Most papers would rather spend the money on airplane tickets to cover their region's NFL or NBA teams, or so entertainment writers can make pilgrimages to Hollywood. These investments are more likely to attract readers, which in turn attract advertising dollars. The intensely bottom-line newspaper chains rarely appear on the honor roll, but always appear at the top of the profit-margin charts.
More of these investigative awards are won through the use of computer-assisted reporting, often involving the use of complex databases. A prize-winning team typically includes at least one journalist who specializes in this work, and often another who specializes in displaying the product graphically.
This region's most important current investigation, by The Spokesman-Review, includes an undercover computer expert who tracked Spokane Mayor Jim West through the murky corridors of online sex.
Watergate, by contrast, was relentless shoe-leather reporting. Door by door, night after night, Woodward and Bernstein looked for people with some knowledge of the affair who would be willing to talk. Because their results lacked graphic detail and were often based on anonymous sources, the scandal failed to attract television coverage and did not impact the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon. It was not until the Senate's special Watergate hearings that television unleashed the power of the camera.
Another dramatic shift since Watergate is from newsrooms dominated by reporters to newsrooms dominated by editors, producers and specialists in graphics and design. "Much of the new investment ... is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it," says the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Nearly all online news is collected by old-fashioned print reporters, employed by organizations such as Associated Press, Reuters and leading newspapers. There is no Yahoo reporting team.
Journalism students, at least in my experience, are less interested in hard-scrabble reporting and more interested in supporting roles. Just as Watergate fired up a generation of would-be investigators, so has the Internet attracted a generation that would rather work online than by knocking on actual doors and talking to actual sources.
Revival of the Watergate story reminds us that no amount of blogging and Web browsing can replace face-to-face contact with real sources, and no portfolio of computer expertise rivals an inquiring and skeptical mind and just plain hard work.
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Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail him at floydmckay@yahoo.com
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