The best obtainable version of the truth

     Investigative journalism reached a pinnacle with the stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and published in The Washington Post on June 18, 1972.

     Over the course the next months the reporters revealed a tangled tale rife with political corruption, dirty ‘hush money’, blind ambition, protected sources, and their work resulted in the unraveling of the top echelon of the United States government.

     Through the hard work of investigative journalism, the ‘Watergate Caper’, as Walter Cronkite called it on the CBS Evening News, was etched into history and eventually led to the resignation of a sitting president, Richard Nixon.

     
     On the 40^th anniversary of that monumental publishing event, another Post writer, Leonard Downie Jr., penned an opinion piece about the current state of investigative journalism and how Watergate shaped its evolution. “Woodward and Bernstein’s techniques were hardly original," Downie wrote. "But, propagated by “All the President’s Men,” they became central to the ethos of investigative reporting: Become an expert on your subject. Knock on doors to talk to sources in person. Protect the confidentiality of sources when necessary. Never rely on a single source. Find documents. Follow the money. Pile one hard-won detail on top of another until a pattern becomes discernible.”

     After seven years of declining revenue, in an effort to maintain the integrity of their newspaper, this week The Graham family agreed to sell The Washington Post to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

     Most newspapers do not have the resources, money, or time that The Post has to spend on important investigative news. Yet they are sometimes able to get the job done. So, is it resources that really drive important stories? As a daily news reporter, the silent stories that remained in my files on the day I walked away still irritate my conscience.

     On that small scale, investigative reporters like The Patriot-News’s Sarah Ganim – who dogged the legal system for more than 18 months to bring the name Jerry Sandusky, a serial pedophile, to the forefront. If she had not gone to court, followed postponed hearing after hearing, and finally published the Grand Jury indictment, would Penn State have been able to bury the scandal? The answer is yes – because they had already done so for many years.

     Ganim won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for her work.

     Last week Sandusky was denied a new trial after being convicted in June 2012 on 45 counts of sexually abusing 10 boys.

     Bernstein, in this April 24, 2012 interview, talks about the state of mainstream media today and the continued responsibility of investigative journalists. In discussing the shift in responsibility to stockholders, in a popular culture which values celebrity, Bernstein sees degradation of information and thereby society.

“Newspapers are not willing, increasingly, to devote those resources to that kind of reporting. … When you don’t have dominant journalistic institutions whose standards really prevail and influence the standards of other journalistic institutions … when you have a culture in which hard, complex truth is no longer the coin of the realm, or is devalued, … when we determine that Marla Maples is bigger news than Nelson Mandela … that is a triumph of idiot culture.”

     Maybe the pairing of the largest booksellers with one of the best newspapers published holds some hope for the future of investigative journalism.