Journalism Under Fire Protecting the Future of Investigative Journalism by Stephen Gillers

Journalism Under Fire Protecting the Future of Investigative Journalism

by Stephen Gillers offers a clear and worrying account of what it is going on in American Journalism and investigative journalism, where just a niche of newsmagazines, see at the voice Boston Globe with its team Spotlight and the investigation about the abuse of wagons of paedophile priests, 300, in Boston opened a problem in the Catholic Church or the Washington Post and their  Watergate. 

First of all let's start to define what is the press. In the first Amendment of the Constitution the Founding Fathers wrote: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press."

The Founding Fathers admitted something peculiar: that the freedom of speech is a prerogative of a healthy state. A country where you can't speak with freedom and joy, where you can't express yourself and where you can't say what you think of situations for fear of repercussions on your person is not a great place where to live in. Absolutely.

Let's see what says the Press Clause: that no one should never reduce the power of the freedom of the press.

Journalism in the USA has always been a great and healthy reality. Recently some worrying wild winds changed a bit this situation: from few decades reporters, journalists became  more "intersected" with big powers and less free than not in the past. Another worrying problem for a journalist that should remain independant. 

But who is a journalist in the USA? A watchdog and someone who should be part of that checks and balances so important for the healthy system of the nation. A guardian of the system and of all the powers existing in the country; at any level. 

Reporting news, without fear or without political or economical powers behind in grade of changing the rules of the game is indispendible for keeping healthy a country and for giving an honest account of what it is going on.

Said that, of course it's not said that the journalist musn't express his/her own opinion. It is indispensible to express worries, or looking at the reality with the eyes of the experience accumulated and existence lived.

After all a reporter is a man or a woman marked by his/her own life and not an historian.

Big or little newsmagazines or magazine must tend to have political inclinations more or less marked, but in a healthy political system this one shouldn't be a problem at all but a resource for uncerstanding much better the reality.

In the USA are classified journalists, so that they can asks for the Press Clause in case of a litigation or defamation, all that people who can prove that with their work, they could be bloggers, they could be video-makers, etc are creating news. 

The new reality, quickest respect to the past is more fragmented and confused and sometimes old habits broken by the net. Which ones? Reading very long pieces of a magazine was appreciated and it presented calm to the reader and a moment of relaxation. The net created with the time a compulsory situation where news are given every second, sometimes in brief shape and so it is becoming always more unnecessary reading long pieces, losing a lot in term also of the so-called deep-thinking.

The book treats largely the use of sources and protection of sources, explaining with cases from the past what the judiciary system said regarding various cases taken in consideration.

Journalists in fact, if they can't be classified part of the system are not out of the system and they answer, when there is a controvertial case to the judiciary system.

A wonderful book, colloquial, for everyone.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori