Gail Phillips

Margaret Page and Ted Grant grew up in the blue asbestos mining town of Wittenoom in Western Australia in the 1950s. Both died from mesothelioma decades later. They remembered playing in the asbestos tailings that were everywhere and spoke about the betrayal they felt later when they realized the impact of that exposure: … we used to climb up on the piles of tailings and slide down… and find the little bits of asbestos fibres in the tailings and…peeling the fibres to see how many fibres we could get out of this. If we had known the danger or our parents were told of the dangers, no way would they have let us children do those things. (Page, 2008) There was nothing ever said, nobody knew. And then I find out in later years that in 1898 they knew about it, in 1926 they had a symposium, in 1936 they also had another one. So they knew in 1956 the dangers of asbestos and they were still mining it.(Grant, 2008)

Investigative journalism represents at one and the same time both the pinnacle of journalistic achievement and the most problematic of news genres. If news is ‘what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising’ 9lord Northcliffe, in Masterton & Patching 1997: 12), then investigative journalism is news in its truest sense – not the daily grind of common-or-garden reporting, but a striving to tell the public something it does not know, something it needs to know and something someone does not want it to know. Yet in pursuit of this real news, investigative journalists may have to break the rules, including many of the ethical principles on which journalism practice is supposed to be based. If, as Tapsall and Varley argue (2001: 3-4), any discussion of the ethics of investigative journalism must have as its starting point an understanding of what difficulties differentiates investigative journalism from the more mundane world of daily reporting.