Investigative Journalism - Examples

Examples

• Julius Chambers of the New York Tribune had himself committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum in 1872, and his account led to the release of twelve patients who were not mentally ill, a reorganization of the staff and administration and, eventually, to a change in the lunacy laws. This later led to the publication of the book A Mad World and Its People (1876).

• William Thomas Stead's series of articles in 1885, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon regarding child prostitution in Victorian London, resulted in the Eliza Armstrong case.

• Nellie Bly's investigative reports on Women's Lunatic Asylum appeared in the newspaper New York World in 1887, and later as a book Ten Days in a Mad-House.

• How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890), which revealed the squalor of immigrant slums in New York City of the 1890s

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906), which exposed shocking disregard for hygienic practices in the meat-packing industry of the early 1900s

• The People of the Abyss by Jack London, on poverty in the East End of London in the early 1900s

• Ida M. Tarbell's history of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company for McClure's Magazine (1903).

• Lincoln Steffens's "Shame of the Cities" series on municipal corruption for McClure's Magazine (1903) was then published as a book.

• Herbert Bayard Swope's role as editor in the investigation into the operations of the Ku Klux Klan won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922.

• Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly 1954 investigation for CBS's See It Now of Senator Joseph McCarthy's conduct in the anti-communism hearings and their 1960 CBS Reports television documentary, along with David Lowe, Harvest of Shame on the condition of migrant workers in agriculture.

• 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 UN Media Peace Prizes. After Year Zero, funds were raised in support of Cambodia.

• Bill Dedman's 1988 investigation, The Color of Money, 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 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.