Who are the gatekeepers in news? How effective is investigative reporting in informing the public?

Gatekeepers are the people who decide what is told and what is not. There is simply not enough room in a newspaper, or not enough time in a broadcast to tell every news story in full. The journalists, editors and producers perform the role of gatekeepers by deciding what deserves to be told and how it should be told. Gatekeeping can be a creative force and they often enhance stories by trimming and editing them. the gatekeepers are usually invisible to the audience, and they are those editors who work behind the scenes to decide what we should and should not see or hear. Im sure gatekeeping is very difficult because being unbiased and unopinionated is one of the strongest values in reporting, but there is really no way to be completely objective and unbiased when you are deciding what makes the news. Gatekeepers must decide what is most newsworthy. To do this they consider a lot of factors, such as proximity to audience, prominence of people involved, timeliness, impact on society, and even the gee whiz factor.

I think investigating journalism is an extremely important method of informing the public. Without investigative reporting i do not think the media could fully function as a government watchdog. For example, without investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstien the watergate scandal would not have been uncovered and president Nixon would have gone unpunished. Investigative reporting is a way to expose government corruption, and now with less journalists involved with this type of reporting, and less people listening, there is probably a lot of corruption going on that we do not even know about.