By
Anya Schiffrin
Anya Schiffrin, director of the Media
and Communications program at Columbia University's School of International and
Public Affairs, introduces the new book "Global Muckraking: 100 Years of
Investigative Journalism from Around the World," which she edited.
Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism
from Around the World (New Press) is the first anthology of
journalism from developing countries that goes back to the 19th century. It
includes 46 pieces of iconic reporting, each of which is introduced by a
journalist, scholar, historian or activist who explains why the piece was
important and what kind of impact it had (or didn’t) after it was published.
Death squads, labor conditions and
trafficking, police brutality, the violence of colonialism, corruption,
mistreatment of women, natural disasters and food shortages. All of these
subjects were covered by the journalists of the past, and many of them paid a
high price.
Mozambique’s muckraker Carlos Cardoso
died under mysterious circumstances
while working on a story. So did Henry Nxumalo, the star
reporter of Drum which was published in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Others were harassed and smeared. Chinese journalist Liu Binyan—once one of the
top in the country and known as the “China’s conscience” was expelled twice
from the Communist Party, was sent into the countryside and today is almost
completely unknown.
Some of these heroic people became
journalists just so they could spread the word about the injustices they had
witnessed. Benjamin Saldaña Rocca in Peru and ED Morel in Belgium were so
outraged by the barbaric treatment of rubber workers that they became
journalists and founded newspapers in order to expose the brutality taking
place. Often the exposure reporting led to boycotts and public outrage.
Sometimes it didn’t. But even then the record was set straight.
Food aid was
not sent to Stalin’s Russia after Gareth Jones broke the news
in the 1930s of the famine there but he provided valuable information for the
historians who came later. Chilean reporter Patricia Verdugo’s chilling account
of one of the death squads operating in Pinochet’s
Chile was used later by investigators seeking to establish the facts
of what had happened.
The journalists of the past used some
of the same techniques as the journalists of today: they went undercover, they
looked for witnesses, they interviewed survivors and they tried hard to verify
what they had heard second-hand. The people who opposed their reporting also
used tactics we know today; hiring lobbyists, lawyers and public relations
people, applying soft pressure and sometimes resorting to violence.
After two years of working on Global
Muckraking (with help from multiple researchers and experts around the world) I
am inspired not depressed. Reading the reporting of the past reminds us that
journalism is important, that it can make a difference, and it reminds us of
the possibilities that still remain in a world filled with injustice.
This post originally appeared on the Global Investigative Journalism
Network and is excerpted on IJNet with permission.
Anya Schiffrin is director of the Media and Communications program
at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Auntie P.
Source: Ijnet.org
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