In the real world, as in the cinema, the idea of the journalist-as-hero finds its purest, most noble expression in the figure of the watchdog. Since a recognisably modern form of journalism first developed in the seventeenth century fuelled by the English civil war and other anti-feudal movements in Europe and north America (culminating in the American War of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789), the journalist in liberal democratic societies has been expected to occupy the social and cultural space between governing elite and governed non-elite; to act as a buffer, or bridge, between those who wield power and those on whose behalf, in a democratic polity, it is supposed to be wielded. In this respect the journalist is a deeply political figure, called upon to be the champion of the people, their advocate and representative. In this representative capacity the journalist is also the watchdog, standing guard over the democratic constitution, the system of law and order which underpins it, and the adherence of the powerful to those rules which, in the defence of the public as a whole, a society has decreed should govern its economy, politics and culture.

The watchdog function of journalism arises logically from news’ fundamental function of environmental surveillance. When, as occurred in early modern Europe and north America between the early seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, the political environment becomes one characterised by democratic structures and acceptance of the belief that the popular will is sovereign, monitoring it, informing the people about it, must include those zones and spheres of society where power resides and is exercised.