www.muckraker.org

Investigative journalism: The field of journalism that digs deeply into the darkest unknown secrets of corporations, criminals and governments, wiping out the cobwebs and tangled lies to expose the truth. Investigative journalists are those that expose the cracks in major cases. Their reports are often termed exposs for this very reason. They can spend months – even years – researching one topic or case so they can complete their report. Investigative journalists are legally and morally obligated to use every reliable source they can find to answer questions about issues that most people, even professional crime fighters, don’t know exist. Investigative journalists utilize public records, documents from lawsuits and legal records, regulatory reports, corporate financial filings, tax records and government reports. They search through public record databases. They also utilize live sources – on-the-record eye-witnesses and anonymous sources – to obtain spoken testimonies about a topic. They research legal, social and technical issues, sometimes scrutinizing government and corporate policies and the outcomes of such practices. Sometimes investigative journalists have to take advantage of the Freedom of Information Acts, a set of laws that establish a “right-to-know” legal process which guarantees access to state held data and government-held information, in order to get data and documents from government agencies. Investigative journalists find loopholes, or make them, to do the “dirty work” of reporting that others are not willing to touch.