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Turning tips into investigations
Offentliggjort 07/03/2008, senest redigeret 07/10/2008
A guide on how to handle tips when doing investigative journalism, the traps to avoid and the things to remember.
BESKRIVELSE/METODE: Global Investigative Journalism Conference, Copenhagen 2003
• Investigative journalism is like government or military intelligence. Same principles, similar methods, same core procedures - but a very different product.
• The “intelligence cycle” is common to investigative journalism and intelligence work. Task / collect / evaluate / analyse / re-task. Identifying goals. Working under constraints on methods and resources. Focussing on the work-product.
• Finding and handling whistleblowers. Assessing history and motivation. Evaluating access and future possibilities of documentary or evidential recovery. Long-term management. Ethical duties and the importance of a taking social history. Managing conflict between impact and protection of sources.
• The critical importance of open source information. Maintaining currency and keeping background. Spotting spoofs and forensic tests. The really valuable electronic tools to use. How the “dodgy dossier” was exposed.
• Keep the critical faculties. Be sceptical – very sceptical. Why is this lying bastard lying to me again?
• The death-trap of inductive reasoning. Why your job is to prove that your story isn’t true. Falsification as your friend.
• Don’t run away from science, medicine or economics. Overcoming and writing about complexity. Testing ideas.
• Corruption – what is the price of a soul. A human life?
• Understand intelligence and evidence, why they are different and why they both matter. Underlying legal principles and journalistic principles. Legal and scientific standards of information. Can statistics tell the truth?
• The “two source” dogma. How many sources are enough? Can a story have no sources?
Duncan Campbell is a Scottish born investigative journalist, author, consultant and television producer specialising in intelligence, surveillance, privacy, civil liberties and government secrecy. His investigations have provoked major clashes with successive British governments. In 1976, he was the first journalist to reveal the existence of the global British electronic spying agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). The government attempted to jail him for up to 30 years for breaking official secrecy laws. In a 1987 clash, Special Branch police officers raided him and the BBC ato seize programme tapes for his series "Secret Society". From 1978 to 1994 he was an investigative writer, then an associate editor and finally the chairman of the British political weekly New Statesman. He founded an indepedendent television production company, IPTV Ltd, in 1990 and pioneered using concealed cameras as an investigative method for filming abuses for Britain’s Channel 4. He revealed the existence of the ECHELON global monitoring system in 1988 and reported on it for the European Parliament ion 1998. In 1999 and 2000, Campbell participated in the joint investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of systematic smuggling and tax evasion by multinational tobacco companies, publishing reports around the world and provoking investigations. In 2002 he was an investigator for the award-winning ICIJ project on the Business of War.