ABSTRACT
In the 1960s British newspapers faced competition from television and, simultaneously, because of the consumer boom, found advertisers demanding more media space. So the newspapers became bigger, and filled the space with big feature and picture reporting. At the same time Doig (1997) has suggested that there was a climate conducive to scepticism and irreverence that made investigative journalism attractive. These factors may account for its eruption. There had always been ‘exposés’, understood as real or claimed revelations of something that had been hidden from us but the investigative traditions of reporting that had led, for instance, to exposés of poverty and exploitation in Victorian Britain had fallen into disuse in the serious newspapers. They left that kind of thing to the populars, mainly the Sundays, with their regular ‘I made an excuse and left’ revelations about prostitution, or ‘I name the guilty man’ pieces on small-time fraudsters (Leapman, 1992: 19). Now similar techniques were to be used for ‘socially responsible’ journalism in the manner of W.T. Stead.
