JO Magazine

In a region still dominated by state-owned media, 'Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism' may sound like a contradiction in terms. But for a few hundred ambitious young writers, it is anything but.

Words by Laith Abou-Ragheb.

ASHRAF AL RAIE INSISTS he has no regrets about giving up on a promising law career to become an investigative journalist. Still, he could probably do without the thinly-veiled threats.

After having an article published that looked at prostitution in Amman’s nightlife scene, the 26-year-old journalist said he was contacted by an angry nightclub owner.

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“He telephoned me and asked: ‘I have girls, money and weapons. What do you have?’ I replied: ‘I have Allah and the pen.’ I was happy that I annoyed him, as I knew that I was doing something right.”

Al Raie is one of a group of reporters trying to push beyond the traditional boundaries of Jordan’s arguably stale media culture. He, and others like him, are being nurtured and supported by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, an Amman-based nonprofit group that is funding investigative reporting in Jordan and the wider Middle East.

Since it was set up with backing from the Danish government in 2006, ARIJ has trained and funded journalists to produce 22 probing and taboo-busting articles that have gained wide exposure locally and abroad. Besides nightclub prostitution, these stories have covered topics ranging from lax food hygiene measures in fast food restaurants to the sexual abuse of children: matters that have long been brushed under the carpet in Jordan’s conservative society.

Regular readers of this magazine will be familiar with reports on all those topics, of course. But what ARIJ is trying to do is a whole different story. Even at JO, when reporters are faced with formidable topics, they often end up relying on the received wisdom of experts, and stories moderated through intermediaries. Itʼs seldom, if ever, that a reporter has time to spend months or even years sifting through data, or collecting hundreds of interviews—doing their own research, rather than essentially reporting on the findings of others.

Al Raie says his investigation of nightclubs took a year and a half to complete—time he spent trying to gain the trust of the women who worked there. In a move that is hotly debated among investigative journalists, Al Raie said he never told the women he was a reporter: “They wouldn’t have talked to me if they got any hint that I was a journalist.”

Investigative Reporters and Editors, a US-based group that broadly has the same functions and aims as ARIJ, also focuses on this idea of individual research, defining investigative journalism as “in-depth reporting that discloses something that someone wants to keep a secret, and is largely the reporter’s own work.”

The idea is that this kind of research will often yield completely different results than will relying on experts, or worse, pundits, to understand a situation.

When 45-year-old Suhair Jaradat spent months following families that had been accused of child abuse, she learned things that donʼt fit the conventional wisdom.

“By actually visiting the neighborhoods where this abuse takes place, I managed to glean small details which eventually became very important to the final story. For example, the local shop in one of the communities refused to serve a family in which a child was being abused. This shows the level of disapproval that exists in Jordanian society about this sort of abuse,” she said.

It also runs counter to many common conceptions, like that child abuse is kept too secret for anyone to know about or that people need “awareness raising” to know that it is wrong.

“I wouldn’t have found this out if I didn’t go and see it with my own eyes,” Jaradat said. “It took six months to complete the story. It was difficult trying to get hold of statistics and even harder to try and track down the families involved. When we did manage to find them, they were often reluctant to talk. Some even threw stones at me to try to warn me off.” But it was all worth the effort in the end. “At the very least, I rang a bell and said something wrong was happening. This is my duty as a journalist; I cannot leave it for somebody else to do.”

“At their best, investigative stories reveal injustice and misery, expose wrongdoing, force accountability [and] uncover wasteful spending, as well as pointing out the failures of public officials, public systems and outdated social norms,” said ARIJʼs executive director, veteran journalist Rana Sabbagh-Gharghour. “Ideally, the stories move people in authority to fix problems.”

Sabbagh-Gharghour said that a number of ARIJ-funded stories have moved authorities to take concrete steps to remedy problems. She said the government shut down scores of shawarma outlets in 2007, after an ARIJ investigation showed that poultry producers supplying these fast food outlets were not abiding by hygiene regulations and that officials were not properly enforcing them.

More than 240 journalists from across the region have completed ARIJ’s four-day training workshop, which is run by highly experienced international journalists. They teach the basics of investigative journalism and how it differs from day-to-day reporting. The course takes a journalist from the general to the specific—starting with a hypothesis that has to be proved or disproved, and relying on research, public records available to investigators, interviews and computer-assisted data analysis to find answers.

HISTORICALLY, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS PLAYED a critical role in Western democratic societies, acting as a counterweight to the many forces that seek to control the flow of information, Sabbagh-Gharghour said. But she lamented that these types of reporters are still a rare commodity in most Arab newsrooms.

“The Arab region suffers from a lack of understanding of the concept of investigative journalism. This is due in part to the fact that newspapers, as well as TV and radio, have been owned by governments or by business people who are closely aligned to governments. Such concentrated governmental or semi-governmental ownership has stifled any genuine effort to dig deep into investigative reporting, especially if the targets are government practices or government personnel,” she said.

And Jordanian editors are often sadly reluctant to fund expensive, long-term investigations, which may or may not produce stories with damning findings that make compelling reading.

“They don’t see the flip side of investigative journalism. It will give them a competitive edge and it will increase their readership,” Sabbagh-Ghargour said. “They don’t mind spending money on new furniture, but none of them would give their journalists time off to carry out in-depth reporting because they’re more concerned with filling holes in their paper. They don’t want to have quality, they want to have quantity.”

In fact, civil society in the Arab world is trying to promote investigative journalism at the very moment that the West is struggling with how to maintain it.

In the past, many Western newspapers and television stations maintained “special projects” departments, which were devoted to pursuing the kind of long-term, labor-intensive projects that ARIJ runs. But these days, any scan of media news will show that many of those departments are being closed down or facing budget and staff cuts, as the traditional media struggle with low advertising revenue, competition from the Internet and pressure to consolidate and cut costs.

ARIJ helps Arab news organizations meet that price gap, providing them with grants to cover the cost of investigative projects. “We pay the whole cost, from A to Z. Each journalist is costing us around $7,000 dollars per story because we’re also investing in their training. We’re trying to remove all the impediments that are stopping normal journalists who are eager to expose something from going ahead,” Sabbagh-Gharghour said. “These investigations are very costly because they involve a lot of travel [and] a lot of interviews, and require access to paid databases, analysis of blood, soil and air samples, as well as consultations with doctors and experts,” she added. ARIJ also provides lawyers specialized in media law to screen stories for any legal risks which could land the writers and their editors in a courtroom. This removes another financial impediment: the constant threat of lawsuits.

The final stories are published in the participants’ respective media organizations, as well as posted on the ARIJ website.