For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Katherine Eban, who has won awards for her work on gun trafficking, pharmaceutical counterfeits, and CIA interrogations. She described some of the low-tech tools and old-school strategies that have helped her break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pakistan’s journalism landscape has lately come under immense pressure from the country’s powerful military. In one of the latest moves to pressure Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English newspaper, the government revoked its ads for the paper, as well as for its sister TV channel, DawnNews. Umer Ali writes for GIJN about the crises.
Investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui, who was forced to flee to France recently after a failed abduction attempt, talks about why he left Islamabad and his SAFE Newsrooms initiative which aims to highlight freedom of expression issues in newsrooms across South Asia.
Journalists exposing corruption in countries with limited rule of law face enormous risks and their stories may not necessarily make things better for anyone. In Pakistan, journalists have employed a different — and safer — approach to trigger positive change by avoiding front-page corruption exposés and using data journalism to expose flaws in the system instead. A GIJN original.
Last month, an international group of investigative journalists launched the Tax Disclosure Project – a global initiative requesting politicians in 20 countries to publicly disclose their tax returns. The project, coordinated by Finance Uncovered, aims to ensure transparency, accountability and an avoidance of wrongdoing and potential conflicts of interest among lawmakers. In this piece, Finance Uncovered co-director Nick Mathiason shares with GIJN the process of setting up this cross-border collaboration.
Threats to NGOs and civil society actors have escalated in a number of countries across Asia and the Pacific, among them the arrests of activists opposing the referendum in Thailand and supporters of the West Papua freedom movement in the Pacific.
In today’s globalized, interconnected world, free and unfettered information is more essential than ever. It’s essential for markets and for trade. And it’s essential to empowering the emerging community of global citizens and ensuring that they are able to participate in a meaningful way in the decisions that affect their lives. Likewise, those who are deprived of information are essentially disempowered. We live in a world in which the abundance of information obscures the enormous gaps in our knowledge
How do you cover corruption in Pakistan’s national security agencies? With caution and plenty of guts. Such reporting got investigative journalist Umar Cheema kidnapped, tortured, and nearly killed in 2010, but the founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan hasn’t backed down. Check out the latest from the Islamabad-based Cheema, who this week revealed that elite counter-terrorism officials used a secret agency fund to buy wedding gifts, luxury carpets, and gold jewelry for relatives of ministers and visiting dignitaries.
