Katie McQue, a British freelance journalist that spent five years reporting from Dubai covering human rights and migration alongside her “business” beats of energy, healthcare, and finance, speaks to GIJN about her work and the best practices reporters can adopt when covering forced labor and human trafficking in the region.
Due to her tenacity in scrutinizing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s family’s transactions, reporter Juliana Dal Piva is a constant target of attack by the president’s supporters. Here, she describes the security measures, collaboration, and persistence needed to keep the spotlight on autocrats in repressive environments.
Among the most frequently used forms of legal coercion against investigative journalists are SLAPPs (“strategic litigation against public participation”), which aim to intimidate reporters into abandoning their investigations. The practice of abusing legal systems by those in power to silence critics has reached global proportions. Its damage is far-reaching and curbing it is an imperative for democracy and maintaining peace.
Throughout 2021, reporters from around the Arab world produced excellent investigative work, some as part of transnational reporting collaborations on human rights, financial investigations, and phone hacking. With a salute to our colleagues who work in this very tough neighborhood, we are proud to highlight some of the best investigative journalism from the past year.
Over the last 12 months investigative journalists in Bangladesh uncovered cases of corruption, abuse of power, money laundering, and institutional negligence. The biggest topic last year, as in previous years, was corruption. But in picking the top stories of 2021, we also considered significance and novelty, the diversity of issues covered, impact, and a focus on the vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society as much as the depth and techniques used in any investigation.
In 2021, as the mainstream Indian media continued to transform into the propaganda arm of the ruling party, intrepid digital platforms, mainly from the English-language press, have published some groundbreaking investigative stories and forced the rest of the legacy media to follow their lead.
Despite worsening legal and physical attacks on the press, solidarity among journalists in Russia and the Eastern European region is growing. Our list of the eight best investigations of the year reveals that more and more cross-border, joint investigations are being carried out, and illustrate continuing reporting courage in the region that should inspire the entire journalism community.
The “dream” of Efecto Cocuyo began mid-2014, initially a discussion in cafes with colleagues and friends Laura Weffer and Josefina Ruggiero, as well as three young journalists. An incubator programme helped the team design an operational and business model and in January 2015 Efecto Cocuyo was born, launching first on Twitter and gaining 18,000 followers in its first week. At the time of writing, it had more than 724,000.
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Russia’s leading independent media outlet, Novaya Gazeta, said: “The award today goes to the entire community of investigative journalists.” Four days later — in a webinar interview with GIJN — Muratov set out the true stakes for investigative journalists who now share that high honor.
Fact-based journalism has been under siege as newsrooms worldwide struggle against the onslaught of misinformation, disinformation, and falling revenues. But the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, two renowned investigative journalists, is a boost to reporters and highlights the importance of quality journalism for democracy.
