Investigative Journalism Research Articles

Investigative Journalism in Kazakh-Speaking Mass Media: History and Practice

Although investigative journalism in the field of foreign media is a rather neglected industry, this is not true for the country. If we will talk about democracy, developing freedom of speech, then the investigative jornalism should be a vivid manifestation of it. Taking into account foreign experience, we are obliged to form our own standards. We must remember that this area has great political weight and social significance. The purpose of the article is to review the history of investigative journalism, the value of investi- gative journalism in modern Kazakh-language media, determine its level, analyze the significance of investigative journalism in identifying criminal cases. Scientific and practical significance: this topic has not yet been studied on the territory of the Re- public of Kazakhstan. Since the era of the information society is changing every day, the research from a new perspective is always in demand. The methods of analysis, discussion, review, deduction and induction, forecasting were used for the research. The result of the research is the definition of the place of journalistic investigation in the field of do- mestic media, the specifics of its writing, preparation and rational, productive work. The study provides the significance, value, and relevance of this industry. The value of the research: this article examines theoretical and practical work of foreign scientists, journalists. Journalistic investigation in the newspaper “Egemen Kazakhstan”, which is the main official newspaper of the country, is analyzed. Key words: investigative journalism, mass media, information society, reportage, topic, Egemen Kazakhstan, stylistics.

Современные подходы к исследованию советской и постсоветской экранной культуры. На материале 53-го конгресса ASEEES, США

The article is devoted to the study of the works of researchers from the USA, based on the material of the 53rd Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) International Annual Congress, which belong to various branches of humanitarian knowledge, but directly related to the study of Soviet and modern screen culture in Russia or other countries (Eastern Europe, India, Cuba, etc.) that have experienced its direct or indirect influence. The interest in the research of American representatives of the humanities, whose share in the total number of participants in congresses is very significant, is due to the fact that for decades, full of dramatic trials, to which the cultural ties of the USSR/ Russia and the USA were subjected, the screen cultures of both countries mutually aroused close interest, although its background could be different. Numerous representatives of various branches of the humanities in the USA pay great attention to screen culture per se or as a source of valuable information about other segments of culture, society, politics, history, etc., especially to segments of feature and documentary films, animation, newsreels, television programs of various formats (TV series, information programs, journalistic programs, especially investigative journalism, etc.) and new media (social networks, especially YouTube, streaming). The article concludes with the conclusions obtained, including: the increased interest of the American scientific community in the study of the mechanisms of formation and reproduction of ideology, power in the history of the USSR/Russia; cardinal points of contrast between the social, political, and cultural agendas of modern Russia and the United States (and other foreign countries); search and analysis of crisis phenomena in society, culture, and politics of the USSR/Russia, reflected in the phenomena of screen culture.

Disrupting Investigative Journalism: Moment of Death or Dramatic Rebirth?, Amanda Gearing (2021)

Review of: Disrupting Investigative Journalism: Moment of Death or Dramatic Rebirth?, Amanda Gearing (2021) Oxford: Routledge Focus, 138 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-001-4, h/bk, $75.99 ISBN 978-1-00313-998-0, e/bk, $26.39

Memorialising COVID-19

Memorialising COVID-19

Crisis accountability and aged “care” during COVID-19

PurposeThis study aims to fill the gaps in mandated reports with social accounts to provide more inclusive accountability during a crisis using the illustrative example of Anglicare’s Newmarch House during a deadly COVID-19 outbreak.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a close-reading method to analyse Anglicare’s annual review, reports, board meeting minutes and Royal Commission into Aged Care submissions. Informed by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the study collocates alternate “social accounts” in the form of investigative journalism, newspaper articles and media commentary on the events that transpired at Newmarch House to unveil a more nuanced and human-centric rendering of the ramifications of a public health/aged care crisis.FindingsCOVID-19 exacerbated pre-existing issues within the aged care sector, exemplified by Newmarch House. The privileging of financial concerns and lack of care, leadership and accountability contributed to residents’ physical, emotional and psychological distress. The biopolitical policy pursued by powerful actors let die vulnerable individuals while simultaneously making live more productive citizens and “the economy”.Research limitations/implicationsOrganisations express their accountability by using financial information provided by accounting, even during circumstances with more prevailing humanistic concerns. A transformational shift in how we define, view and teach accounting is required to recognise accounting as a social and moral practice that should instead prioritise human dignity and care for the betterment of our world.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the limited literature on aged care, extending particularly into the impact of COVID-19 while contributing to the literature concerned with crisis accountability. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is also the first to examine a form of biopolitics centred on making live something other than persons – the economy.

What role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture in sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence from Ghana

Although media capture is a global issue, it is a particularly significant problem in sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana. Media capture occurs when media organisations become incapable of performing critical watchdog functions, such as fighting corruption and human rights violations, because of pressures from capital and power. This article addresses a fundamental question: In Ghana’s Fourth Republic, what role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture by capital and power? I argue that social accountability actors perform three essential, interrelated roles: (1) defending media freedoms and independence, (2) activating and facilitating the media’s work and (3) legitimising and encouraging critical journalism. In doing so, they use a combination of strategies – from advocacy, denunciation and legal action to establishing and funding non-profit media outlets to do investigative journalism. This work extends the literature by examining the crucial role social accountability actors play in counteracting media capture so that critical journalism can do its job.

Money Laundering Through Offshore Companies as a Way to Avoid Confiscation of Illegally Acquired Property

Offshore companies often, especially in the last few years (the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers scandals), attract a lot of attention from the media and investigative journalists around the world, who invest several years of research in uncovering secret money flows of the world's most powerful people. Numerous small states and jurisdictions guarantee clients the maximum secrecy and security of their capital from tax liabilities. They also make it difficult to discover the origin of money, often acquired through illegal activities. This paper will focus on the establishment of these companies, what is their purpose and role in global financial flows, why they attract an increasing number of legal entities and individuals, the consequences of their actions on the world economy and state budgets, and international institutions that supervise the operations of offshore financial centers with the basic goal of their adjustment to global financial standards.

Media Reporting on the Problem of Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Perspective of Members of Their Families

The paper theoretically elaborates on the issue of the families of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is still relevant after more than two and a half decades since the last war. In this regard, the text highlights the lack of relevant information on finding missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war as the main problem facing families of missing persons. The media play an important role in the visibility and pointing out the need to solve the problem of missing persons in B&H, and often contribute to the overall picture of the public through their (non)work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance and shortcomings of media reporting from the perspective of the families of missing persons in B&H. In this regard research was conducted that included 100 family members of missing persons, to examine their views on the manner and frequency of media reporting, the perception of the professional approach of journalists to whom they had the opportunity to give a statement, but also ways to improve media coverage the issue of missing persons. The conducted research revealed that the statements of family members of missing persons in the media are reported factually, mainly during the anniversary celebrations, and less investigative journalism, and that newsrooms do not have specialized journalists on this topic. According to the results of this research, we concluded that closer cooperation between the media and the Associations of Families of Missing Persons is needed to improve media reporting on the topic of missing persons in B&H. It would greatly contribute to solving this problem in society.

How Can the Private Media Be Strengthened to Investigate and Expose Corruption in Ghana? Understanding Ghanaian Perspectives

ABSTRACT The media are often considered an essential player in the fight against corruption. As part of the measures to combat corruption, it is essential to understand how to make the media play a critical watchdog role in sub-Saharan Africa. Using Hallin and Mancini’s work on media systems and data from in-depth semi-structured interviews, the following question is addressed: How can the Ghanaian private media be strengthened to investigate and expose corruption? The findings show the need to establish an investigative journalism fund, address political parallelism, improve journalistic professionalism, and ensure favourable state interventions. The implications these findings have for policy are presented in the conclusion. This article contributes to the theoretical, empirical, and policy debates on strengthening the media to be an active, critical watchdog in fighting corruption.

RETRACTED: Information skills and literacy in investigative journalism in the social media era

The study aims to determine the preferred information skills and evaluate information literacy and skills in the social media era on the example of investigative journalism to surmount the majority of challenges it faces. The challenge-based survey conducted among 281 reporting journalists from various countries revealed that their information skills and literacy are average. The survey results show that half of the respondents (52%) recognise the importance of these characteristics, while 38% are sure that information literacy and skills are not necessary and 10% chose the variant ‘I am not sure’. As the indicators show, the main aim for investigative journalists’ writing is to influence the society’s mind about some facts presented in the reports (40%). Only 25% of respondents write with the purpose to present reliable information that indicates the level of their information literacy. The latest strategies in the professional development of investigative journalists in modern social media era allow overcoming the major challenges, including those related to the influence and interests of third parties. The practical significance and prospects of further research are explained by the possibility of using the obtained statistical data to increase the level of information literacy and skills not only of investigative journalists, but also other specialists who work with information.

Echoes In Familiar Spaces: Audio Styling and the Audience’s Invitation to the Worlds of Limetown and Within The Wires

Podcasts are useful for influencing the way the audience thinks – audio drama especially lends itself to this application, with writers being able to cloak stronger political messages within the fictionalized worlds of their narratives. Podcasts like Limetown and Within The Wires can effectively tell stories about political and social issues through their involvement of the audience in the world of the work. The familiarity of the audience with the auditory styling of the podcast as well as the clear audio signposting used in both podcasts gives the audience a touchstone to their everyday life that makes it less strenuous to situate themselves in the fictional world and focus on the narrative despite other potential distractions. Through close listening examinations of both podcasts, I analyze and discuss the impact that the scripting and use of audio elements have on the audience's perception of the narrative and the implications for audio drama and podcasting as a whole. While Within the Wires is slightly more effective in the use of formats that are fairly universal in their recognizability to the audience, Limetown is more familiar to those who have listened to other podcasts before; this combined with Limetown's similarities to the critically acclaimed investigative journalism podcast Serial had significant impacts on each podcast's popularity.Keywords: podcasts, audio drama, Limetown, Within the Wires, Serial, audience perception

Stay Strong, Get Perspective, or Give Up: Role Negotiation in Small-Scale Investigative Journalism

ABSTRACT This article examines how investigative journalists, especially those working in newsroom contexts, deal with discrepancies between ideals and practice by actively negotiating their roles. Based on interviews with 28 Swiss journalists, it argues that despite having a strongly shared ideology revolving around the democratic roles of journalism, investigative reporters negotiate their investigative commitment on a daily basis. The study provides a conceptual model of this process based on a distinction between “liquid” and “solid” negotiation strategies, in the sense of Deuze. “Liquid” strategies involve reinterpreting, contesting and combining various journalistic roles, leading journalists to negotiate their investigative performance based on various individual organizational and institutional factors. Conversely, “solid” strategies tend to involve dogmatic attitudes toward investigative journalism. While this approach allows journalists to live by their ideals most of the time, it can also lead to simply dropping out. The study concludes with several important implications for research on journalistic identity and roles, as well as on media management, particularly regarding journalists’ agency in redefining journalism.

Review: Falun Gong: Spiritual Warfare and Martyrdom, by James R. Lewis

The starting point of Falun Gong: Spiritual Warfare and Martyrdom is leader Li Hongzhi’s instructions to practitioners to refrain from talking to ordinary people about high-level spiritual things. He advises instead for them to talk about the persecution they suffered and tell people they are just doing exercises. The author, James Lewis, pivots away from these statements to delve into Falun Gong’s teachings related to spiritual violence.The introduction hints at the emotional labor behind the research. Lewis is the former editor of the Journal of Religion and Violence, and like other scholars (including this reviewer), he initially wanted to help persecuted members. Later, he discovered the spiritual movement was not as it seemed. His thesis is clear: the leader Li Hongzhi urges practitioners to seek brutalization. The more they are brutalized, the more Li Hongzhi’s power expands.The next chapters examine this brutalization and its origins. Lewis discusses the spiritual teachings that drive practitioners to protest the Chinese government with foreseeably grim consequences. An especially relevant doctrine is that during abuse, the aggressor passes precious white matter called de to the victim. Therefore, practitioners do not resist abuse because they receive de from it, which contributes to their xinxing (spiritual nature).By itself, this belief could be heartening to those who are mistreated. However, Lewis draws attention to its context—Li Hongzhi’s warnings of an imminent apocalypse in which only those with high-level xinxing will survive. Lewis says these teachings incite a kind of spiritual vampirism where practitioners provoke the police to arrest and imprison them as a way of quickly getting enough de to save themselves. Their need for de meshes with the Chinese government’s need to stamp out rebellion, and the line between attacker and victim blurs.These points are not new, but Lewis makes them more persuasive by drawing on his interviews with former practitioners who were at the main protests in China. These sources enable him to identify a crucial problem. Li Hongzhi urges practitioners to protest and to let go of attachment to their own body, yet he gives few specific directions about how to do this. This ambiguity allows him to attribute failures to the purportedly demonic Chinese Communist Party or to alleged demons masquerading as his followers.Lewis demonstrates the impact of this ambiguity by recounting the grisly scene of Falun Gong self-immolations in Tiananmen Square in 2001, which followed Li Hongzhi’s cryptic exhortation to go beyond the limits of forbearance. In the wake of the tragedy, Falun Gong issued a statement that the self-immolators were not real practitioners, a view that Lewis finds implausible. He is at his most poignant when he describes meeting one of the surviving self-immolators, Chen Guo. He reached out to shake her hand only to remember she lost both hands in the fire.Interspersed throughout the book are intriguing sections on Li Hongzhi’s self-perception, how pro-Falun Gong editors gerrymander Wikipedia pages, and why Western media often uncritically accepts Falun Gong claims. The book closes with an afterword in which Lewis describes his disenchantment with Falun Gong and addresses potential counter-arguments to his research.Practitioners and advocates may feel confronted by Lewis’s study. Irrespective of what incentivizes Falun Gong martyrs and why they refrain from disclosing these incentives, many have been traumatized. Certainly, Lewis does not support the way the Chinese government brutalized them, but he does not soften or whitewash Falun Gong’s dogmas, and the volume could be subtitled “Why it is unwise to join Falun Gong.”The book will be of interest to scholars studying the pay-offs of martyrdom, as well as Sinologists and researchers of new religious movements. The most appreciative readers may be investigative journalists delving into the hidden side of Falun Gong. That is because Lewis has a captivating style and invites the question of what other secrets Falun Gong may be hiding.

Comparative Analysis of Anti-corruption Reporting by Daily Trust and the Nation Newspapers in the First and Second Tenure of Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari Government

Studies on corruption coverage by newspapers in Nigeria during the Buhari administration focused on broad corruption issues, his first tenure, and almost zero studies on anti-corruption during his ongoing second tenure to lapse in 2023. This study aims to examine anti-corruption reporting by two Nigerian newspapers, Daily Trust and The Nation, within the first and second tenures of the Buhari administration. The study content-analyzed 475 editorial contents covering the first year in each of the first and second tenures (2015/2016 and 2019/2020). Findings revealed that The Nation reported more stories on anti-corruption than the Daily Trust in both the first and second tenures. However, both newspapers recorded a significant drop in corruption coverage in the second tenure. News stories took the lead in the first and second tenures, with 72.4% and 84.4%, respectively. The study found that both newspapers published more front and back page contents in the first tenure than in the second tenure, but published less front and back page reports on corruption compared to reports on the inside pages during the period of study. The newspapers also published more stories, measuring more than 100 lines during the second tenure than the first. In contrast, more uncritical reports of anti-corruption were published in the first tenure than in the second by the two. The study concluded that poor investigative journalism drive, among other factors, was responsible for the decline in corruption reports, especially during the 2019/2020 period. It recommends that newspapers strive not to allow ethno-religious interests to influence editorial responses on corruption and increase their investigative journalism drive to win the corruption war in the country.

Moving Barriers to Investigative Journalism in Latin America in Times of Instability and Professional Innovation

ABSTRACT Latin American journalism has experienced recent transitions marked by digital affordances, including a growth of investigative journalism. The region has also experienced more political and economic instability, giving rise to a wave of threats and harassment against journalists. This repeated cross-sectional study analyzes the changing perceptions of threats and attacks as barriers to investigative journalism, through surveys of journalists from 20 Latin American countries conducted in 2013 and 2017. It performs intra-regional comparison utilizing the hierarchy of influences model. It found that women and those with fewer years of working experience (individual characteristics) were increasingly likely to perceive threats and attacks as a main barrier to investigative journalism. It also found that those working for digital platforms and working more independently (organizational characteristics) were also increasingly likely to perceive threats and attacks as major barriers.

FAKE NEWS & HATE SPEECH: A Colloquium Report

Nigeria, the proverbial giant of Africa, has in recent times, been beset with the politics of paternalism which has translated into heightened consciousness in ethnic nationalism and extremist immoderation, all too manifest in the now very dominant paradigm of fake news and hate speech. Amidst this threatening state of confusion, the nation-state witnesses its highest level of polarization among the citizenry and records a harvest of kidnappings, abductions, raping and ritual killings, all of which the government blames on fake news and hate speech. 
 As part of its contribution in the attempt to mitigate and possibly proffer a solution to the twin monsters of fake news and hate speech, the Olusegun Obasanjo Centre for African Studies (OOCAS) at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Abuja organized a one-day Colloquium on Fake News and Hate Speech. This report, therefore, is a descriptive analysis that highlights the culture of impunity with which political elites incite and polarize the citizenry, especially on the contentious issues of religion and ethnicity.
 The paper applies the critical discourse analysis approach to evaluate the colloquium proceedings - the views, positions and propositions of discussants/participants and the ensuing communiqué that fake news and hate speech are largely products of mainstream and social media; with governments and political elites as the main culprits who exploit the volatile issues of religion, politics and ethnicity to polarize and incite.
 The paper concludes with nine communiqué recommendations including, that the mass media, especially the mainstream media, should invest more in the practice of investigative journalism and Nigeria’s governments, in general, should provide good governance, equity and justice to the citizenry; that, participants and discussants believe will curb the menace of fake news and hate speech.

It Takes Two to Tango: How the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign in Israel Was Framed by the Health Ministry vs. the Television News

BackgroundThe internet has become a major resource in information transfer during COVID-19, and traditional means of communication are digitized and accessible online to the public at large.ObjectivesThis study seeks to examine how Israel's two main television news channels (Channel 12 and Channel 13) covered the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, compared to how the Ministry of Health ran the campaign.MethodsA qualitative study based on triangulation of online content analyses from three different sources: advertising campaigns, social media posts and reports on television news channels. The research sample included 252 reports from the newsrooms of Channel 13 (n = 151) and Channel N12 (n = 101), Israel's two leading news channels, all broadcast between December 1, 2020 and November 30, 2021. The sample also included posts from Israel Ministry of Health Facebook page and advertising campaigns from the Facebook page of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LAPAM), which constructs advertising campaigns for the MOH (113 items).ResultsThe research findings reveal congruence between the way the MOH framed its vaccination campaign and news coverage of the vaccination issue. The vaccination campaign used three primary framing strategies: (1) positive framing (emphasizing the vaccine's advantages and stressing that the vaccine is safe and effective based on cost-benefit calculations and public health perspectives); (2) fear appeal strategy (conveying persuasive messages that seek to arouse fear through threats of impending danger or harm); (3) attribution of responsibility strategy (blaming the unvaccinated and targeting all those who criticized Israel's generic vaccination policy).ConclusionAs the watchdog of democracy, the news should function as a professional and objective source that criticizes government systems if necessary and strives to uncover the truth throughout the crisis. Public trust, which is so essential during such a crisis, can be achieved only if the news channels provide reports and meaningful journalistic investigations that challenge the system. By doing so, they can help fight conflicts of interest that divert management of the crisis from the professional health field to the political-economic arena.

Talking to God: Religion, Para-Science and Disciplinary Practices as Consolidation Tools

The article examines social instruments used to consolidate small religious groups in modern society. Such groups are viewed as a variation of the development of a local Orthodox parish founded as a community of like-minded people. The research subject is closed religious community that has existed in the Perm region (Russia) for over thirty years. The community has evolved from a typical Orthodox parish to a modern-type spiritual group that used non-Orthodox sources of information and devotion, and was led by a woman. The study identifies most effective social instruments for the consolidation of those type of religious community. The research includes reconstruction of the history of the community and the analysis of the materials of spiritual seminars held there, reflecting gradual transformation of the teachings and change of the leader’s status. The research data were acquired from several sources: interviews and personal correspondence of the author with former members of the community, materials of journalistic investigations, etc.

Images of Transgressions: Visuals as Reconstructed Evidence in Digital Investigative Journalism

ABSTRACT The epistemic authority of journalism has undergone significant theorization and empirical investigations in past years. This article contributes to this growing body of scholarship by analyzing how collected images and videos are used as evidence in 14 visual video investigations by The New York Times. A visual discourse analysis following the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) is conducted to map out how an investigative way of seeing is established by coexisting discursive practices, including narrativization, coding schemes, highlighting techniques, and juxtaposition of video footage in split-screen mode. The article argues that these discursive practices serve as markers of authority which together facilitate a demonstration that recontextualizes collected visuals into evidence, reanimating them as external objects of knowledge that can be interrogated in epistemic struggles concerning the definition of controversial events.

Exposing Islands of Refuge

Refugees and wealth refuges are two sides of the same coin by which global human and financial inequality, illegality and injustice find their most extreme expressions. At opposite ends of the spectrum, both embodied humans and disembodied wealth are stateless, untouchable, out of sight, and exist outside of the experience and understanding of most people. Journalism is an important mechanism to expose and criticise the social, legal and political frameworks that allow and encourage these discourses of silence. This essay analyses the impulse to reveal, divulge and shock, and its potential to change public perception, laws and policies through aesthetic representation as resistance in Behrouz Boochani’s journalistic refugee memoir, No Friend but the Mountains (2018), and in investigative financial journalism that exposes offshore wealth havens by Oliver Bullough, Moneyland (2018) and Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands (2011).