One last lecture...
Investigative Journalism.
"...what somebody somewhere wants to suppress, the rest is just advertising..." - Lord Northcliffe
What does it mean to 'investigate'?
-must be intelligent
-informed
-intuitive
-inside and intimate
-invest in your stories/the issue
The two aspects that particularly interested me from this lecture and which I feel are extremely significant in the regulation of society are the roles investigative journalists and journalism plays in providing a voice to those who have none and in it being a custodian of conscience.
I feel it i extremely important that all people within society have the freedom to speak and the means to be heard and I feel it is this that investigative journalism is able to do and in which I would be interested in pursuing if I were to go further with a career in journalism. They are the stories I find grab my attention and hold it most easily and which always seem to have me asking questions of myself and others afterward.
The act of being society's custodians of conscience is the second pivotal aspect investigative journalism has the power to influence. As the slides and Dr. Redman elaborated on, it has the potential to take society's morals and norms and hold those who breach them up to public scrutiny, the key concept behind this being EXPOSURE. Exposure allows for the issue, problem, breach, facts and so on to be known to the greater majority so as to let them make up their own opinions and thoughts regarding them. This I believe is imperative if we are to have a society in which there are a diverse number of interpretations and ideas about things rather then a society whose interests and thoughts are influenced and controlled by a few.
The topic of WikiLeaks arising, being listed as an investigative journalism 'trailblzaer', in other words, revolutionary, game changer, is also of interest to me. I find hearing and reflecting upon a diversity of opinions in regards to the concept of wikileaks extremely beneficial as they help me to gain a greater understanding of it as a whole and in the process allow me to move closer to coming to a standpoint on it in my own opinions as I am yet to decide whether I feel it is an entirely good thing or not. It seems impossible for stability within government, for safety of operations and behind the scenes decisions to be made and carried out without some level of secrecy. I don't feel there is necessarily a right or wrong stance to take on this topical debate however.
Well with that reflection of lecture 12 I will resign my blog to interest stories from now until Friday or until I no longer wish to continue posting in it. It has been an interesting and beneficial experience for me personally as I have been pushed to look further into journalism stories of interest, think about new ideas relating to the profession and it values and aspects and learn to use a new program. I do not feel my blog will simply end with the sending of my link to Ali for the final time. It has definitely grown on me and so hopefully I will continue to record moments of insight here for my own preservation of thought regardless as to whether or not anyone else actually ever reads it.
Peace.x
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