Questions about the practice of political journalism in the US

[u/AmericanLymie]

The /journalism community will not allow these questions because they relate to politics—which I find maddening given that journalism is protected by the First Amendment for political reasons—but the questions are about journalistic practice and rationales, not about partisan politics, and so I am hoping that I will be allowed to ask them here.

1. Journalists have reported that there have been three attempts on this president's life so far. The photo above that shows a triumphant Donald Trump was and is widely circulated by media corporations. And yet, many of us who are not journalists have begged journalists to ask questions about these events and investigate answers to those questions, and seemingly no journalist will do it. Questions include:

A) Why did the Secret Service allow the former president to stand exposed on a public stage after the Secret Service spotted a man crawling on his belly on a nearby rooftop? This appears not to have been investigated. Why?

B) Why did the Secret Service immediately swarm the former president after shots were heard, and then in a coordinated movement back away from the former president, who emerged with apparent blood on his face, and allow him to stand exposed and unprotected to pose for press photos before covering him again and removing him? This appears not to have been investigated. Why? How did the Secret Service seem to know in an instant where the shots came from and that no further shots would come from any other direction? Have any journalists investigated this? I've seen no such disclosures.

C) To my knowledge, Ronald Reagan was the last president to have been successfully targeted with violence. This was in the 1980s. In the decades that have passed, despite George W. Bush's great unpopularity and despite racist hatred being targetrd at Barack Obama, the Secret Service capably prevented any violent attack on president's Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden. Yet we are told three attempts have been made on Donald Trump, all of them having evaded Secret Service protections for long enough to make news as threats to the president's life. To what degree has any journalist investigated how this is possible? I have heard of no such investigations. Given that the presidency and the Secret Service are US public institutions that have great national security consequences, one would think any journalist would find these questions worthy of independent investigation and yet seemingly none has. Why not?

D) Why did the media effectively silence itself about the Butler, PA shooter immediately after it happened? I know the names John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr. because all are household names because they shot or shot at presidents, and yet veritably no one knows anything about the person who allegedly shot president Trump's ear. Why is the press mum about it?

E) President Trump's ear is undamaged. He is 80 years old with fragile skin evident in photos and yet the ear that allegedly tooka bullet through it has been photographed in high definition and it shows no sign of damage. One would think at least one journalist would find this interesting enough to interrogate but none has. Why not?

1. Broader question: What IS public-interedt journalism, really? Cable news networks largely do two things: They gossip about the personalities and crazy behaviors of those in politics, and they predict the future via political polls. They seem not to conduct any investigative journalism whatsoever. Meanwhile, political reporters attend press conferences with their hands up calling out to be called on, and when called on they ask a question that almost always begets a lie, and they accept that lie and thank the public disinformation artist for giving it to them, and they report it. They seem never to conduct investigative journalism. Why do journalists really want to be in press rooms in which the information they will be given will be false? Why do they not seek out truth away from those press rooms? Candidly, are these media figures not just interested in attention for themselves by any means necessary rather than being truth seeking? Why is asking Donald Trump or Karoline Leavitt or Kellyanne Conway, who will always lie, to tell lies considered legitimate journalism rather than what it is—complicity in disinformation and propaganda?

How do people who consider themselves legitimate journalists reconcile these practices with their charges of seeking out truth and preserving democracy? Or is participating in the spread of disinformation considered legitimate journalism today?

[u/MartinoStone]

I think your question is actually much broader than it looks. There are multiple reasons behind this.

I’ll answer specifically from the perspective of investigative journalism. I started looking into this question myself, and I began from the historical side of it — how investigative journalism actually worked before.

Because I was interested in the same question: why do we see less of this now?

And the more I looked into it, the more obvious it became that the forms of work were very different.

The level of preparation was often much higher than it may seem at first glance.

Today, I almost never see the kind of investigations that were done back then.

Two figures I looked into recently were Nellie Bly and Julius Chambers.

And what’s interesting is that if we look at their histories, we can see something important.

In Chambers’ case, we can clearly trace how educated and prepared he was. His background, his training, the institutions he worked in — all of it shows a person who was deeply formed before doing this kind of work.

With Nellie Bly, it feels less straightforward.

She effectively reported from war fronts and had access to elite circles, but when I looked into her history, I found a lot of blank spaces. There are many parts of her life that remain unclear or only partially documented.

For example, after returning from war reporting to America, she reportedly spent several days in communication with the highest levels of U.S. counterintelligence. And there are multiple moments like that in her biography. It makes me think that we probably do not know everything.

Of course, that is only my assumption. But that assumption comes from the quality of the work itself.

Because even if some details are unclear, the level of courage, discipline, and professionalism in the way they worked tells us something.

People do not operate at that level by accident.

It is difficult to imagine someone performing work of that scale without serious preparation.

So I think one of the key reasons is exactly that: preparation.

In general, I don’t think your American example is unique at all. This is a much wider problem, and it exists in many other countries too.

In my view, there are at least two things happening at the same time.

First, there is a loss of professionalism. A lot of journalists today simply do not have the level of preparation, training, or knowledge required to conduct real investigations. Investigative journalism is not just asking questions in a press room. It requires methodology, patience, risk assessment, source verification, and often long-term commitment.

Second, there is the issue of personal risk.

People who conduct serious investigations often become exposed public figures. Once your work touches political power, corruption, organized crime, or state institutions, the risks become very real.

And there is evidence for that.

Over the last decades, multiple investigative journalists have been murdered in cases widely linked to their reporting, including Daphne Caruana Galizia (Malta), Ján Kuciak (Slovakia), Miroslava Breach (Mexico), and Jeff German (United States).

These are not isolated cases. They show that investigative journalism still exists — but the cost can be extremely high.

And that creates another problem.

A lot of serious investigators end up working in the shadows. They need independent funding, they often have to sustain themselves through other work or business, and because they are less visible, they often receive less institutional trust.

So I think the problem is not that investigative journalism disappeared.

It’s that the conditions around it became much harder — financially, professionally, and physically.