Investigative Journalism

Abstract

In my career as a journalist, there has never been a war on terror but a war of terror. John Pilger. 1 "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible….This political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombed from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck…this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraselogy is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language'. (1946). RenditionArguably the finest example of investigative journalism during the 'war on terror' has been the exposure of the Central Intelligence Agency's 'extraordinary rendition' programme. Probing journalists, whose researches were encapsulated by British journalist Stephen Grey's book Ghost Plane in 2006, have painstakingly identified over 1000 CIA 'ghost flights' criss-crossing the globe since 2001. 2 Many of these flights were for 'extraordinary rendition' where terror suspects were secretly, without the suspect's agreement, taken by force from one country to another and in some cases kidnapped.Rendition is exactly the kind of practice that journalists exist to expose as it is extrajudicial and involves nation states abusing fundamental human rights. These states seek to avoid the trial process. Rendition flights have not been used to move suspects from a war zones like Afghanistan or Iraq to the United States where these 'terrorists' could be charged and tried. The receiving nation was not the U.S. but a third

Experimental adaptive Bayesian tomography

“…For such a protocol the infidelity scales as 1 − F ∼ N −1/2 for the most interesting for applications set of almost-pure states. One can more or less significantly alter the pre-factor by a clever choice of measurements [5][6][7], but the scaling is unaffected. A natural question is whether it is possible to beat this limit?…”

Coping with Europe: How Greek journalists deal with disconnections between the EU and national levels

“…Capital can also be experiential, and gut driven:I was always into investigative journalism, to ask, study, look for information out there. (J8, National media)Apart from the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism and ethics, the romantic perspective about what investigative journalism signifies, contributes to the construction of the ‘good’ EU affairs/world news journalist (De Burgh, 2008).…”

Reconstructing investigative journalism at emerging organisations

“…Working as an investigative journalist at BuzzFeed meant allocating time for in-depth research in a traditional journalistic manner but also being present at places where sources would be and letting the stories suggest themselves (see, for example, Ettema & Glasser, 1998; extensive interviews with American investigative journalists). Traditional investigative journalism depends on one's ability to locate and network with unique and exclusive sources (see, for example, Sambrook, 2018;de Burgh, 2008). By locating exclusive sources to which few other journalists had access, BuzzFeed journalists were able to generate unique stories.…”