A study of prime-time newsmagazines in 1997, for instance, reveals a genre of investigative reporting that ignores most of the matters typically associated with the watchdog role of the press. Fewer than one in ten stories on these programs concerned the combined topics of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics, or social welfare - or any of the areas where most public money is spent. More than half the stories, rather, focused on lifestyle, behavior, consumerism, health, or celebrity entertainment. (Marc Gunther, Nieman Reports, 27, Summer 1999)

Perhaps investigative journalism is a relic of Chalaby’s and Habermas’s 19th century, with its different values; perhaps, on the other hand, it is just a product (satisfying a demand for pleasurable indignation!), or simply a marketing technique for selling the main product, as with any other media artefact.

[In the 1960s] the investigative traditions of reporting that had led, for instance, to exposes of poverty and exploitation in Victorian Britain had fallen into disuse in the serious newspapers … In 1963 there were two major investigations that have continued to be cited as exemplars: the first was [Profumo] … The second was an exclusive by Sunday Times Insight, whose reporter Ron Hall detailed the methods used by a criminal landlord, Rachman … By 1969 the Times was using bugging devices to gather evidence of Metropolitan Police corruption. These examples set a trend and by the late 1960s there were many new vehicles for investigative reporting in the national media …
[In the 1970s] the UK went through an economic slump; with the print media facing financial problems and upheavals in staffing, newspaper investigations appear to have declined in number. [The Daily Mirror] gave up that role.
By the 1980s it appeared that more investigations were being undertaken by television. ITV companies competed to demonstrate dedication to the remits which had been placed upon them by the national regulations …
As much as any ideological commitment to the free market, it may well have been loathing of [investigative journalists] that was behind the impetus to dismantle the BBC (which did not succeed) and make the broadcast media increasingly commercial (which has to an extent succeeded).
During the 1990s several new current affairs series were born … the scope of investigative journalism was quite extraordinary and became a well-established feature of British public life in the 1990s, thanks to developments in the organisation and economics of the press, consumer demand and broadcasting regulation, the consequences of which were to become only too apparent in the Blair years.