Stories

When journalist Umar Cheema launched the Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan (CIRP) last week, he did so with a bang: A blockbuster story that hit the headlines around the world. Two-thirds of Pakistani MPs, his report said, do not pay their taxes. Neither did President Asif Ali Zardari – famous for his spending sprees, polo games and luxurious country estates – and more than half the Cabinet.

India’s best journalists are producing impressive investigative reporting these days. But the unprecedented arrests last week of two journalists for extortion highlights a troubling problem for the country’s free-wheeling media: widespread payoffs and a worrisome lack of credibility. Veteran Delhi-based journalist Shantanu Guha Ray reports on what one prominent editor calls “our News of the World moment.”

A courageous effort by the Sunday Times in South Africa into the operations of a police death squad won the top prize in the 2012 African Investigative Journalism Awards.

The GIJN warmly welcomes six new member organizations, extending the global network to 74 groups in 35 countries.

For five-and-a-half-months, a team of European journalists has researched, at the behest of the European Parliament, the critical role that investigative journalism can play in deterring fraud in the European Union. Their nearly 300-page report, released today in Brussels, is a landmark study that makes a powerful case for the contribution that investigative reporting makes “to greater transparency on this issue, tracking irregularities, fraud and corruption, and uncovering misspending on different levels and scales in the EU member states and the EU institutions.”