Do people not have the right to know if a company is being investigated?

Journalists have been responsible for the slow drip of information that has uncovered scandals – now their job is becoming even harder, writes Chris Blackhurst

(Getty)

Not for the first time I’m writing that I became a journalist because I watched a film and read a book about two journalists bringing down the most powerful man in the world. No shots were fired; they did so by gnawing away, terrier-like, by exposing a cover-up.

When I give talks to students on journalism courses, I find myself citing Watergate for another reason. Imagine if there was a similar occurrence here in the UK, would we be able to plod away, day after day as Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein so famously did? Would we, in the end, get the full story?

The fact is that we imagine that this country is a paragon of liberal openness, that finding out things about the rich and powerful that they would rather you did not discover is relatively easy compared with elsewhere. Certainly, where the likes of China or North Korea are concerned that is a given, but do not suppose for a second that British journalists push at open doors. We do not.