Reluctant activists? The impact of legislative and structural attempts of surveillance on investigative journalism.

This research is problem-driven but with the aim to provide impetus towards further theoretical development and analysis of the factors shaping communicative environments within which a ‘watchdog’ philosophy of investigative journalism is crucial for democracy.

Main Findings

An attempt of mutual watching, with the aim of bring- ing about transparency, lay at the core of the acquisi- tion and dissemination of information in the WikiLeaks and Snowden affairs, and its transformation into jour- nalistic material, in a continuation of a journalistic tradition that has understood itself as a watchdog. In this era of possible veillance, albeit it with an imbal- ance of scale and capacity tilted in favour of the State, journalism’s attempt to take part in a ‘normalised’ veillance through the use of Big Data has severe impli- cations that do not contribute towards more transpar- ency, due to the imminent danger of watchdog journalism becoming unfeasible. We are finding jour- nalists in a state of reacting to surveillance threats, within a climate of surveillance but not engaging unproblematically in surveillance themselves.