On Investigative Journalism

The future of Journalism

The internet and social media have now empowered the PR trade and freed it from subservience to the news media.
What does this mean for the future of journalism, and the future of the public interest?

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'Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed, everything else is public relations.'
George Orwell
(Photo; Bush House, BBC (ca. 1941): George Orwell participates in another session of Voice. Seated, from left to right, are Herbert Read (a literary critic and poet) and Edmund Blunden (poet and novelist).   Standing, from left to right, are George Woodcock (a Canadian-born pacifist, anarchist, historian, and essayist), Mulk Raj Anand, Orwell, and William Empson.)
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If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Hunter S. Thompson

You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.
Margaret Atwood

I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism.
Kate Adie

Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.
Henry Grunwald

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
Tom Stoppard