Let the truth drive all investigative reporters

By Ndirangu Wachanga: Sunday Standard Sunday August, 13, 2006

After the Catholic Church condemned Galileo Galilei to life imprisonment for endorsing Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, many must have dreaded even to think about the shape of the universe.

This fear, however, never constrained human creativity. For years later, fictional adventures of Phileas Fogg were energetically captured in Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. But the indefatigability of Fogg could hardly rival the achievements of Elizabeth Cochrane, an American investigative journalist who circled the world in 72 days. Unlike Galileo who had interests in Ptolemaic systems, Cochrane, popularly known by her pen name, Nelly Bly, had immense interest in human life.

Bly, an exceptionally gifted reporter whose daring investigative ventures produced stories that shocked the world, is an inspiration to modern day investigative scribes as they pursue the truth. Bly’s intrepidity is a lesson in dangers that confront investigative reporters. It is an embodiment of commitment and genuine self-abnegation that must inevitably characterise a genuine truth-seeker.

When working for the Dispatch newspaper in Pittsburgh in 1885, she volunteered in a factory where she got a chance to investigate and lay bare horrifying working conditions, insulting wages, and the insolence of child labour.

She joined Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1887. In order to have an immediate experience of what was happening in a New York insane asylum. Bly feigned insanity and was admitted as a patient. Upon "regaining her sanity", and being released from the hospital, she exposed the hell that patients were going through. They were being beaten, fed on bug-infested food, and subjected both to torture and punishments that were not requisite for rehabilitation. When a jury was formed after Bly’s report, the hospital was given a face-lift and normalcy put in place.

And such investigative prowess is emerging in the Kenyan media. Although our country continues to be suffocated by seemingly endless scandals allegedly perpetuated by Government officials, it is the Press that is deflating the concealed filth-inflated balloons. Some of the disgraceful acts being uncovered are so ludicrously sleek that we are embarrassed as a dying nation. Others are so preposterously mortifying that the rapacity of our leaders can only make us feel insulted and debased.

The swelling entries in the register of dishonours that our country is keeping should unnerve all of us. Although we may not have any moral authority to throw the first stone — because we are all to blame for the wickedness that has delivered our country down the abyss of ineptitude — we, arguably, owe a great gratitude to the media for exposing the socio-political stench punctuating our society.

While the Anglo-Leasings and the Goldenbergs are not insensitively depleting our blood, we have the Arturs brothers to choke our inspiration and call us names, to dampen our spirit as a nation, ultimately strangling our own sense of nationhood.

But the media, despite assuming the "watchdog" role, must possess a spotless guideline in its unpitying scrutiny of reality. After all it is the destiny of our nation that is at stake.

It was Francois Voltaire, the quick-witted French philosopher and essayist, who warned against narrow-mindedness. He advised journalists to be sceptical, "not to trust anything that you have been told unless it can be confirmed by independent examination". Although investigative reporters may possess an acerbic style, they must lay down the facts and tell the reader what these facts mean. It has been argued that journalists, like scientists, are not advocates, but seekers of truth.

According to Herbert Altschull, a renowned American media scholar and researcher, the task of an investigator is not just to wander through murky waters in search of information, but also to make it public and raise the dark facts from the abyss and lift them to the glare of the day.

It is probably with this in mind that former United States President Theodore Roosevelt referred to journalists as muckrakers in 1906, a term that came to include novelists and critics for exposing commercial exploitations and corruption in politics. Although Roosevelt was in cognisance of the role of investigative reporters, he at the same time inattentively criticised them of being obsessed by sensationalism and irresponsibility, as downward looking characters, similar to those in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, who were perpetually in search of the grimy. This, he argued, antagonised the government and the public. But when the Washington Post investigators, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal in 1972, indicted 40 government officials and forced President Richard Milhous Nixon to resign in 1974, the triangular relationship between government officials, media and the public was severed, almost irredeemably.

Undoubtedly, investigative reporters have gained prominence, especially with their targeting of the powerful. Critics have argued that investigative reporters arrogate themselves duties that appropriately belong to elected agents of justice. But when expected guardians of justice become bad mothers preying on their own children, redress is inevitable. In their role as the Fourth Estate, investigative reporters take a lot of risks, with some paying the ultimate price with their lives.

When Pius Njawe, a renowned Cameroonian investigative reporter and publisher, questioned the health of President Paul Biya, he was imprisoned for "reporting bad news". In a smuggled prison note, Njawe tearfully narrates how his pregnant wife suffered a miscarriage after being beaten by prison wardens. In November 2000, Carlos Cardoso, a Mozambican investigative reporter was gunned down for covering sensitive issues that included corruption. Our own, among others, Chaacha Mwita, Kwamchetsi Makokha and David Makali have been victims of political heavy-handedness.

The 1947 Hutchins Commission described newspapers as the "common carriers of public discussion". For any informed discussion to take place it is incumbent on investigative reporters to pick the "muckrake" and seek information from "enemies, losers, and people in trouble, for these persons are the most likely to find out what is bad about those under investigation".

While the investigative reporter is not blind to the fact that those under investigation can contest the report and claim foul play, improper investigation that fails the credibility test can only lead to injurious repercussions. The media have painfully paid for libel charges. But whether reporters should shy from exposing individuals, even when public’s right to know prevail over any disadvantages to the involved individuals, remains an ethical question in our newsrooms.

By exposing information concealed from the public, investigative reporters are only making it possible for truth and falsehood to compete in "the market place of ideas".