The Global Casebook
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The Global Casebook An anthology for teachers and students of investigative journalism Edited and with introductions by Mark Lee Hunter 1 Table of Contents Preface: Why this book exists and how to use it, by Mark Lee Hunter ..................................................4 1. Putting how over why......................................................................................................................................4 2. How to use this book........................................................................................................................................4 3. The state of the movement...............................................................................................................................7 Chapter One. Filed but not forgotten.....................................................................................................11 A. Angry White Man: The bigoted past of Ron Paul, by James Kirchik..........................................................11 B. From Bulgaria with Love, by Alexenia Dimitrova.......................................................................................19 Chapter Two. The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Investigating social phenomena....................................25 A. The School of Hard Knocks, by Barry Yeoman............................................................................................25 B. Divorced women in Jordan suffer from lengthy legal procedures: Children face the tough dilemma of choosing between their parents, by Majdoleen Allan........................................................................................36 C. Europe by desert: Tears of African migrants, by Emmanuel Mayah ...........................................................43 Chapter Three. Can this planet be saved? Investigating the environment.............................................58 A. Streams of Filth, by Shyamlal Yadav............................................................................................................58 B. Conning the Climate: Inside the Carbon-Trading Shell Game, by Mark Schapiro......................................65 Chapter Four. Who’s in charge here? Investigating the crisis of governance........................................77 A. Stealing Health in the Philippines, by Avigail M. Olarte and Yvonne T. Chua ...........................................77 Part One. Up to 70% of local healthcare funds lost to corruption ..............................................................77 Part Two. Health politics demoralize doctors...............................................................................................82 B. The stage-managed famine, by Lutz Mükke ................................................................................................89 Chapter Five. The local face of globalisation......................................................................................100 A. Casualisation undermining workers, by Alvin Chiinga..............................................................................100 B. A question of ethics: The letter from Lundbeck, by Anne Lea Landsted...................................................103 C. Exporting an Epidemic, by Jim Morris.......................................................................................................113 Chapter Six. Following the Money: Frauds and offshore funds..........................................................126 A. State aided suspect in huge swindle, by Lucy Komisar, Michael Sallah and Rob Barry...........................126 B. Offshore Crime, Inc., by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project ...................................135 Part One. Crime Goes Offshore .................................................................................................................136 Part Two. Laszlo Kiss, the Offshore Master ..............................................................................................139 Part Three. A Reporter Forms an Offshore ................................................................................................141 Chapter Seven. Traffickers and Tyrants...............................................................................................144 A. Latvian Brides, by Jamie Smyth and Aleksandra Jolkina..........................................................................144 2 Part One. Ireland's sham marriage scam....................................................................................................144 Part 2. Ireland must take action to stop sham marriages............................................................................149 B. Fields of Terror: the New Slave Trade in the Heart of Europe, by Adrian Mogos.....................................153 C. A Taliban Of Our Very Own, by Neha Dixit...............................................................................................161 Chapter Eight. When the game is fixed: Investigating sport...............................................................168 A. Killing soccer in Africa, by FAIR...............................................................................................................168 B. How to Fix a Soccer Match, by Declan Hill...............................................................................................176 C. Jack Warner still won’t pay Soca Warriors their 2006 World Cup money, by Andrew Jennings...............183 Chapter Nine: The War on Terror........................................................................................................191 A. The intelligence factory: How America makes its enemies disappear, by Petra Bartosiewicz..................191 B. Hearts, minds and the same old warlords, by Stephen Grey.......................................................................205 3 Preface: Why this book exists, and how to use it By Mark Lee Hunter 1. Putting how over why When I brought investigators to my journalism class at the Institut français de Presse, masters students often turned into children. They would marvel at these strange heroes who uncovered secrets and dared to make enemies. They would ask things like, “Were you scared?” Finally I told them, Stop admiring these people so much. It’s a way of telling yourself that you can’t be like them. Stop asking why they do the job, and start asking how, so you can do it too. This was unfair of me, in one specific way: The why of investigative reporting can’t be taken for granted. I tell people that we do the job to change the world (and ourselves). But the world doesn’t always do what we prove it should do. It just goes on being what it was. That leaves only one reason we can count on for motivation: We try to leave a true record of what we were, what we did, how we lived or died. In the process, we say to the people who lived the stories we tell, Yes it happened, and no, it wasn’t just or fair. I said that to a man I was writing about once in so many words, and I also said: My story will prove you were right, but it won’t fix your life. He said: “So?” He had lost hope, but he was glad to have company. To our mutual amazement, when the story was published he got his career back. But that was the part I couldn’t promise, and neither can you. The only promise you can surely keep is to tell the story. Is that enough? Perhaps not. But if you don’t believe that telling the true story matters, whether or not you get a material result, you should do something else with your life. Either you think telling that is a meaningful thing to do, or you don’t. If you don’t, nothing anyone might say will convince you. That’s fine, because nothing you might say can convince me otherwise, either. This book exists to help you tell such stories. 2. How to use this book The idea for this collection began during a seminar for investigative reporters in Dakar, Senegal, where I was teaching from Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists, my previous (2009) collaboration with UNESCO. Participants observed that they might have a better idea of how to investigate if they had a common understanding of what a good investigative story looks like. Of course I had brought some samples with me, and of course (because that is the way trainers and intellectual property rights tend to function) most of those stories were by me or my masters students, whose work at a French public university was public property. But they wanted something else and something more; specifically, they wanted to know what journalists around the world were doing. Were they facing the same problems of access to information, and if so, how were they solving them? Were they dealing with publics who paid attention to their work, or did they have to fight for attention? How did they organise themselves, and how did they turn their information into stories? This book tries to answer those questions, and to satisfy the desire that underlies them – the desire for reporters everywhere to feel that they too can contribute to the renaissance of investigative journalism. This is a movement, and anyone who practices investigative journalism can join. (Not everyone does; there are still practitioners who prefer to follow their own paths, and that’s fine.) Its members are the great majority of contributors to this book. I’ll say more about the movement later. 4 My first objective was to gather a broad range of material, from within and outside the Global Investgative Journalism Network (GIJN) – I’m proud to be a founding member – that