Within the media, who controls what stories, news, messages, etc. are being sent out so the mass audience can see and think about it? Gatekeepers oversee these tasks. According to the book The Media of Mass Communication by John Vivian, gatekeepers are media people influencing messages en route. Gatekeepers have the ultimate power to control what messages get sent out to the mass audience. It is essential to have gatekeepers who are unbiased, so that both sides of a story, news, or message is presented within the media. This is not always the case, but it is better to have unbiased gatekeepers in order to give something the public can think about rather than telling them what they should think.
In terms of investigative reporting, how effective is it in informing the public? In many ways investigative reporting is effective. Many of the stories being covered are reports that reveals information that is usually startling and usually are not really supposed to be known to the public. A perfect example of how investigative reporting was effective to the people is the whole Watergate incident. President Nixon was covering up a scandal in which people of his cabinet were hiring people to steal information about the future candidates to help aid Nixon in the upcoming election. Nixon was covering this up so well that the people believed the first official reports that five men tried to rob the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate offices. But two journalists dug deeper and uncovered the truth of what actually was going down. This shocked the public and essentially created the appeal and effectiveness of investigating reporting and brought it to the forefront of types news stories.
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