Tag Archives: investigative journalism

Medill National Security Journalism Initiative goes global

GIJN_band_logo_largeWASHINGTON — The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative has been elected to membership in the Global Investigative Journalism Network, an international association of nonprofit organizations that support, promote, and produce accountability and watchdog reporting.

The vote on March 2 means the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative is now part of the GIJN efforts to foster investigative journalism through training, conferences and other resources.

The National Security Journalism Initiative’s membership will provide Medill students with the opportunity to participate in collaborative international projects with fellow GIJN organizations, as well as give students and faculty access to an unprecedented network of global reporting contacts and resources.

“I’ve been watching GIJN’s rapid global growth and the excellent work of its many member organizations since it was first established, and in recent years it has become increasingly clear that it is one of the most important players in the world of international investigative reporting,” said Josh Meyer, the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative’s director of education and outreach, who first reached out to GIJN last year. “We’re honored and humbled to be accepted as one of its members.”

The 2015 cohort of inductees extends GIJN’s reach to include 114 reporting groups in 53 countries, according to its announcement. Other prominent GIJN members include the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

“It’s an honor and a great opportunity for Medill to be part of the Global Investigative Journalism Network,” said Ellen Shearer, co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. “We look forward to participating in the network of great journalists.”

To learn more about the Global Investigative Journalism Network’s work in support of investigative journalists around the world, visit http://gijn.org/.

For more information about the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, visit http://www.nationalsecurityzone.org.

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"Torture" vs. “enhanced interrogation techniques”

Disclosing the gay-bashing preacher who hires his own rent-boy is a satisfying feeling on a personal level. All cultures have a special distaste for the hypocritical and two-faced. So it is even more gratifying when journalists uncover the nation’s national and foreign policies that contradictory. They range from the absolute hypocritical to the simple inept.

It’s not clear what impact the reports will have ultimately, but two recent front-page reports in The New York Times revealed how our ostensible allies in the Kurdish region of Iraq are supplying oil to Iran in contravention of American calls for an embargo. The Times noted with interview and photos that this trade is not a surreptitious activity but a daily caravan of more than 1,000 oil tanker trucks traveling U.S. protected roads that are helping Iran sustain itself against the embargo.

Even more direct, the Times reported that the IRS allows tax deductions for religious groups who are funding Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian West Bank contrary to U.S. declarations, agreements and policy interests in the region.

You could find dozens of examples of such two-faced policy but finding the journalists, the institutions willing to fund that type of international investigations and reporting is becoming more difficulty.

Not that the press couldn’t find its own hypocrisy and contradictions: A Harvard study showed that the news media generally stopped using the work “torture” after the Bush administration “enhanced interrogation techniques” and an actual policy were revealed. The administration insisted that those techniques, including waterboarding were not “torture,” and almost overnight the nation’s news media changed. It stopped using the word “torture” supposedly because it was challenged by Bush political interests. Never mind that the media has used the word for decades to the same interrogation style from the Middle Ages to Japanese treatment of American POWs in World War II.

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