Conclusion

Investigative journalism remains relatively under-theorised, and the majority of theories have been developed from and applied in broader fields of communication, cultural and media studies. Surprisingly, normative assumptions continue to provide the foundation for much theorising about investigative journalism. On the whole, investigative journalism is seen as ‘a good thing’, central to the idea of ‘the press’, and even if flawed in practice, an essential component of flourishing liberal democratic systems. In short, such worlds would be worse off without it, and political economy theorists in particular have been exercised by the prospect of investigative journalism being squeezed from the media by market factors such as commercialisation and hypercompetition. On the other hand, the same critics have been sceptical about the digitally-enabled scope and scale of open source citizen journalism (for an example, see https://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/16/181428/870). This ambivalence was also evident in responses to media liberalisation and deregulation which, at one and the same time, threatened to starve investigative journalism of resources, and to provide additional opportunities for freer and more channels of expression, both in the cause of market forces.