The watchdog navigates to bark: investigative reporting on corruption in Vietnam

Abstract

This study explores sources of influence on anti-corruption journalism in Vietnam and examines how investigative journalists navigate to commit to the truth and stay objective. Fifteen in-depth interviews with investigative journalists reveal that reporting about corruption in Vietnam involves questions of internal and external constraints that limit editorial autonomy and hinder the watchdog role of journalism. In their commitment to professional ideals, journalists often confront dissonances and limitations. The combined impact of political and economic fields on investigative journalism in Vietnamese journalism demonstrates how journalism, power, the market force, and society are interrelated. Amid such influences, journalists have to practice self-censorship in order to avoid political risks and deal with economic imperatives in the newsroom. Findings of the study corroborate previous assumptions drawn from literature regarding the constraints on journalists’ editorial autonomy in different social contexts, contributing to more holistic understandings of the effects of investigative journalism on public transparency and journalists’ role as scarecrows and watchdogs. The study also offers implications about the way authoritarian governments and their associated press systems sustain themselves.

Keywords:

• Investigative journalism
• influences
• watchdog function
• editorial autonomy
• corruption
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The exceptions are a few countries that seem to retain their commitment to investigative reporting, such as Sweden (Nord & von Krogh, 2021), Denmark (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2021), the US, UK and Australia (Carson, 2019).

2 While occupying an important position as a mediator among primary fields–the spheres of academia, politics, economy, art, religion, law, among others–the journalistic field is also dominated by other fields, especially political and economic ones (Benson & Neveu, 2005).

3 In other words, the autonomy of journalism as a field is weakened by increasing pressures from economic and political constraints while still impacting other fields of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1998 as cited in Benson & Neveu, 2005, pp. 2–7). The journalistic field possesses significant symbolic power as the society is mediatized widely; thus, other fields seek to exert their power on it. Consequently, the journalistic field finds itself subject to “a cross-pressure from its own professional ethics of conduct and the logic of, for example, the economic field (commercialization)”—to use Carstensen (2005, p. 544). Journalism, as a semi-autonomous field, as well as fields of politics, economics, religion, cultural production, etc. are all governed by their own “rules of the game” and “offering their own particular economy of exchange and reward, yet whose basic oppositions and general structures parallel each other” (Bourdieu, 1998 as cited in Benson, 1999, pp. 464). The “actions” in the journalistic field are structured by relations of power, which come from what Rupar (2007, p. 593) calls “the interplays inside the field between heteronomous and autonomous poles (between advertising and news sections, for example), from institutional settings (media laws, or the political system), and interrelations between individual journalists and the field.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dung Q. Nguyen

Nguyen Quang Dung (PhD) is a lecturer at the Faculty of Journalism and Communication, USSH, Vietnam National University-Ho Chi Minh City. He is conducting research on investigative journalism, media capture and editorial autonomy, and other topics on new media and Vietnamese society.

Hien Nhan

Hien Nhan (MA) is a journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City. He covers Vietnamese politics and development policy.