Much of this reportage has the earmarks of watchdog reporting, but there is a difference. Most of these programs do not monitor the powerful elite and guard against the potential for tyrannical abuse. Rather, they tend to concern risks to personal safety or one's pocketbook. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in 1998, for instance, dissected a genre of investigative reporting that ignores most of the matters typically associated with the watchdog role. More than half the stories, rather, focused on lifestyle, behavior, consumerism, health, or celebrity entertainment.
Safety can often be an important target for watchdog reporting.
When local television news employs its I-teams in such stories as dangerous garage doors or how dirt and bacteria on the clothes consumers put in their washers spread to other clothes, it is worse than a weak story. These come from consultants who literally offer stations the scripts, the shots, and the experts to interview or the interviews themselves already on tape, and are specifically designed for sweeps periods to generate ratings. The second problem is that exposing what is readily understood or simply common sense belittles investigative journalism. The press becomes the boy who cried wolf. It squanders its ability to demand the public's attention because it has done so too many times about trivial matters.