How journalists can report under pressure and violence

How journalists can report under pressure and violence

One of the first things people do when meeting a friend or acquaintance is share information. "Have you heard about . . . ?" We want to know if they've heard what we have, and if they heard it the same way. There is a thrill in a shared sense of discovery. We form relationships, choose friends, make character judgments, based partly on whether someone reacts to information the same way we do.

When the flow of news is obstructed, "a darkness falls," and anxiety grows. The world, in effect, becomes too quiet. We feel alone. John McCain, the U.S. senator from Arizona, writes that in his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, what he missed most was not comfort, food, freedom, or even his family and friends. "The thing I missed most was information -- free uncensored, undistorted, abundant information."

Call it the Awareness Instinct.

We need news to live our lives, to protect ourselves, bond with each other, identify friends and enemies. Journalism is simply the system societies generate to supply this news. That is why we care about the character of news and journalism we get: they influence the quality of our lives, our thoughts, and our culture. Writer Thomas Cahill, the author of several popular books on the history of religion, has put it this way: you can tell "the worldview of a people . . . the invisible fears and desires . . . in a culture's stories."

Twenty leading journalists gathered in Mexico City on Friday, Feb. 18, to exchange information and discuss ways that Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) can continue to help reporters who, under pressure and often at great personal risk, continue to do investigative reporting on U.S.-Mexico border topics such as children victimized by cartel violence, wasteful government spending, political corruption, cartel operations, as well as the huge economic and social costs of our two nations’ war on drugs.

The event was the fifth in a series of bilingual workshops that IRE conducted from 2009-2012, which were supported in part by grants from the Ford Foundation. To discuss next steps, IRE brought together Mexican and U.S. speakers who had participated in border workshops in Laredo, El Paso and San Diego, as well as Mexico City-based journalists (both Mexicans and American correspondents) who cover similar issues.

Mexico City-based reporters Daniel Lizárraga, author of the book "La Corrupción Azul," an investigative exposé based on Mexican presidential government archives, and Lilia Saul, of El Universal newspaper, spoke about their continuing efforts to use Mexico’s open records law to pressure government officials to release documents about public and political spending.

Sources:
knightcenter
journalism