Mark Day in The Australian rails against the Fairfax job cuts – wait for the familiar punchline.

Getting the information against the wishes of those who would hide it, navigating privacy and legal restrictions and defending defamation actions designed to stop investigations can be very expensive. It is time-consuming and often unrewarding, in the sense that a lot of time and effort can be wasted by going up blind alleys, and even when important revelations are made they fall on the barren grounds of apathy.

But it is also the most important kind of news any society can have.

Without it, the foundations of democracy are threatened. If we lose the ability of journalists to shed light on the workings of our governments and communities, we lose a vital pillar of democracy.

Journalism has never been great at revealing information. Investigative journalism at the turn of the 20C reached mass audiences through the novel – like Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle, or the book like Ida Tarbell‘s History of the Standard Oil Company. The criminal investigations of the 1920s came about because US newspapers wanted more sensational crime stories than badly funded police departments could provide.

If you want to talk about democracy read Robert Dahl. In Dahl’s view we live in polyarchies – a world of competing interests. Contested information is just one facet of that competition. Politics and public policy are another.

I like investigative reporting. But to give it a mystical role in our mythologized democracy is – to quote the great Peggy Noonan – ‘political bullshit‘.