The Fourth Estate

The World Bank and investigative journalism 
The link between the venerable institution and the Fourth Estate isn’t an automatic one to make that is, find out about the work that Montreal investigative journalism Roderick Macdonell is doing. 
 

The words "Investigative Journalism" have always had a special subversive ring to them. They conjure up images of the press overturning vicious regimes by exposing their putrid underbellies to the world.

Better known for its conservative economic policies, the World Bank was set upon a surprisingly liberal strategy, promoting the practice of investigative journalism… in order to help curb corruption in developing and transitional nations.

So it struck me as most incongruous when, five years ago, I received a telephone call at The Gazette from an official with the World Bank offering me the opportunity to do three weeks of investigative journalism training in Uganda and Tanzania. I was to do these workshops with my colleague, Alex Norris, the most prominent (some would say untamable) of The Gazette's young lions.

Why would the World Bank want Canadian reporters to train African journalists in investigative journalism, particularly in a country like Uganda, which had seen so many tens of thousands disappear under the murderous regimes of Milton Obote and Idi Amin?

To my generation, investigative journalism is the Watergate affair, a scandal in which one of the most reviled presidents in U.S. history resigned a quarter of a century ago in the wake of compelling reportage by the Washington Post that revealed that Nixon had abused his powers, defiled the constitution and violated the private lives of law-abiding citizens -- citizens he put on his hate list because of their political activism and opposition to him.

Nixon's demise helped bring a new breed of idealistic, reform-minded journalists into the newsrooms of North America.

In Canada, journalists began digging up their own scandals, holding governments to higher levels of accountability. At the time, and in a spirit of solidarity, reporters from English and French Canada formed an organization meant to promote the cause, the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ). The center was launched to give progressive journalists a forum for them to become savvier and more effective watchdogs.

The CIJ published a magazine then, The Bulletin, and for three years in the 1980s, I co-edited and then edited the magazine, which is the precursor to the magazine you are now reading. I also began doing investigative journalism full-time with William Marsden (still at the Gazette) and Andrew McIntosh (of the National Post), two of Canada's best diggers. And I taught Press and the Law at the journalism school at Concordia University.

The economists at the World Bank have over time observed that prosperous nations (all) tend to have one thing in common: A relatively free press. Hence the economists concluded that a free press is a pre-condition to economic prosperity.

So when the offer to "facilitate" sessions on Investigative Journalism came to us, Norris's knowledge of Africa and my experiences muckraking in the muddy trenches of Canada made us a sound and able duo.

After some initial reluctance from our employer, off we headed to East Africa. We agreed with the dictate of the then editor, Joan Fraser, that while doing this work we would be barred from writing about the World Bank, as we would be in a conflict of interest. That was a sacrifice we were prepared to make, as the Wold bank rarely, if ever, came up in our work as reporters at The Gazette. An international body, it was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War to re-construct Europe. Now its work is the developing world and it is staffed primarily with economists whose remedies and prescriptions for the have-not nations have not always met with success.

So, were Norris and I meant to help journalists topple corrupt regimes? And to what end? No. The terms of reference were not that radical. But for a body that is better known for its conservative economic policies, the World Bank was set upon a surprisingly liberal strategy, promoting the practice of investigative journalism, and this in order to help curb corruption in developing and transitional nations.

Of course, there is a theoretical underpinning to it all. The economists at the World Bank have over time observed that prosperous nations (all) tend to have one thing in common: A relatively free press. Hence the economists concluded that a free press is a pre-condition to economic prosperity. Furthermore, they concluded that corruption is among the most serious impediments to development.

In point of fact, our training mission was for the World Bank Institute, the teaching arm of the World Bank. The institute's work with journalists is one component of a broader strategy whereby corruption is viewed not as a moral issue, but rather a consequence of institutional weaknesses.

With this in mind, the institute also works at the request of countries, often by assembling action-oriented coalitions of leaders from civil society and government. These actions are frequently accompanied by efforts to up-grade the skills of bodies such as the judiciary and organizations that oversee houses of parliament.

From the get-go, the mission to Uganda and Tanzania showed Norris and me that many of the young journalists we were about to train had never been formally educated in journalism. As well, the trainees had found their way into the craft more or less by accident, and they did not always have a clear idea of their roles as journalists.

Almost all were earnest and well-intentioned. But these reporters tended to view their roles as uncritical stenographers and direct transmission lines from the political elite to the readers and viewers, unaware of the need to filter what they were told and challenge figures of authority in order to hold them to account. Our original terms of reference stated that we were to share some notions and techniques of investigative journalism, but we quickly re-grouped and instead did drills on the basics: writing leads, attribution, taking notes, balance, fairness and accountability.

In terms of corruption, we encountered unexpected concerns. Our mission was meant to upgrade reporters' skills to expose wrongdoing, but at times, the enemy seemed to be within. We heard tales from freelance writers in Kampala, for instance, that feature editors at the biggest newspapers were extracting kickbacks from them to run their articles.

In Tanzania we gained new insights when editors told us that some of their reporters had no motivation to do investigative journalism, preferring instead to pocket money by extorting story subjects with threats that if they did not pay significant sums, the reporters would fabricate and publish stories alleging wrongdoing. Alternatively, journalists sometimes had their pockets lined by vain politicians and venal businessmen who paid them to write glowing public relations prose about them or their merchandise.

The Tanzanian reporters also told us that investigative journalism was not always feasible because when media owners were not blocking publication of stories to protect their cronies, editors were alerting subjects of pending investigative reports, then receiving payoffs to spike the pieces.

In retrospect, these revelations should not have come as a surprise. Reporters in the developing world are among the worst paid workers in their countries. A journalist earning $200 a month in many countries is considered fortunate. The presence of rotten apples among journalists can therefore be seen as a reflection of poverty of these emerging democracies. And despite the corruption of some journalists, polls have shown that they are more highly regarded by the public in some Third World countries than politicians, police and judges.

There is a good reason for journalists being held in such high regard. Despite the perversion of the profession by some, many others are heroic idealists, fighting the good battle, and struggling in nearly impossible conditions, sometimes even being killed for their efforts. Journalism in Africa in the best of circumstances is a grind; the simplest of questions posed to Government officials and politicians are often ignored or given short shrift because the powerful view the local media outlets with contempt and disregard. The notion that the public has a right to know and a right to be informed does not sit well with many rulers in emerging democracies who chafe and rage at the thought that they are accountable for their actions.

After Tanzania, Norris and I did a number of other workshops over the next few years, taking short leaves from the paper or using up our vacation time. Soon we began working solo. I did one-week workshops in Benin, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Istanbul, even in Vienna where journalists from central and Eastern Europe were flown in for a regional training Since 1996, in addition to the countries above, I have conducted training workshops in Kosovo, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Cote d'Ivoire, Nairobi, with side trips to meet with partner organizations in Russia, France, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and the Netherlands.

No matter where, the symptoms are similar. The fledgling news media are economically weak. Reporters tend to be young and either untrained or poorly trained. The enabling environments for press freedom are fragile, and reporters still get tossed in jail for long weekends for solid, flawless, enterprising reporting that offended some tin-pot autocrat.

Gradually our workshops took on greater heft as the caliber and skills-level of trainees increased. Generally the workshops involved gathering twenty-five journalists together for a week of investigative document research, interviewing techniques, using the Internet as a research tool, sessions on access-to-information laws, ethics, and field research on investigative topics.

Every few months, the World Bank would call and ask,"Do you want to do a workshop in Ethiopia, or the Ukraine, or Ecuador?" But all that changed in 1999 with the Institute's great leap forward in investigative journalism-training. Face-to-face workshops were about to become as extinct as Mauritius's Dodo Bird. Henceforth all the training programs run by the World Bank were to be converted to distance learning via live video-conference and television broadcast, reaching many more people at one time than the previous workshops ever could.

I took what is now a two-year leave from The Gazette to do this. Yours truly was provided with the services of an Australian can-do pedagogical learning expert and after several weeks of immersion in the world of interactivity and group "constructivist" learning, we successfully transformed the curriculum to a distance-learning format. This form of learning and training involves the talking back and forth with trainers in Washington and participants in classrooms in the developing world who see and interact with each other live on large television screens. This is possible thanks to the advent of satellite communications. In some cases, the session is broadcast by one-way television to the distant sites (from Washington) and live dialogue goes on between the sites and headquarters using telephone and speakers to amplify the volume and improve the sound quality.

Last October, the new program was rolled out. Instead of delivering to 25 journalists in a face-to-face workshop for one week, we presented in French from a state-of-the-art studio in Washington to 110 journalists in seven class-rooms in several West-African countries: Senegal, Cameroon, Benin, Mauritania, Burundi, and to another twenty reporters in Haiti in the Caribbean.

Our course consists of ten classes, three hours per class, once-a-week, for 10 weeks. The sessions are meant to be highly inter-active with participants working in their five-person groups at each site half the time, combined with cross-site presentations and discussion another 35% of the time, and inputs from Washington for about 15% of the 180 minutes. Between classes we use the Internet both to send materials to the participants by e-mail attachments, to receive assignments, and to engage in list-serve discussion forums on topics concerning investigative journalism and ethics.

Did it work? Yes. According to the results of thorough evaluative questionnaires, participants still prefer face-to-face workshops, the high-technology sometimes fails, but all in all, the participants consider that they learn as much or more by this technology-driven form of training.

Between February and April of this year we scaled up and delivered the course to twice as many journalists, this time to Anglophone African journalists in Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Tanzania. Again there were annoying technology failings, but that was more than offset by the synergy and cross-fertilization of the cross-site learning. In July, the course to Latin American countries will wrap up, and there are plans to present the course in Portuguese.

Sea changes have occurred in the last five years. In 1996 participants were paid modest per diems to attend the training workshops. Now the participants pay tuition fees, not to the World Bank, but to the African universities and training institutions where our courses are delivered. At best, we would previously conduct face-to-face workshops with about 150 journalists in one year. Now the numbers are quadrupling, and the costs have dropped considerably despite $200 US-per-hour satellite fees. It has gone from a cottage industry rate of production to industrial levels.

The issue that most often comes up is "impact." What has all this training accomplished — if anything? The question is often asked. So the institute has asked a team of Dutch experts to do a five-year (meta) retrospective analysis. It's much like asking a journalism school what impact it has had on society. Highly intangible. Quite speculative. Some editors in Uganda, where the program began with years ago, say that over time they have noticed a remarkable increase in pro-active investigative reporting.

It's hard to really measure.

I take comfort in the knowledge that there are several hundred journalists out there who better understand their roles as watchdogs, who now know the basics of investigative journalism, and — sometimes, when the iron is hot — will strike. 

---

Roderick Macdonell has won three Judith-Jasmin awards for top journalism in Quebec and has been a finalist for two National Newspaper Awards and two CAJ Investigative-Journalism awards. He was research associate to Stevie Cameron for her best-selling books On the Take - Crime Greed and Corruption in the Mulroney Years; and Blue Trust.