The Rewards of our Work: keynote speech at the 15th Ukrainian Investigative Journalism Conference, Lviv, August 22 2023
When I was invited to speak here, I was honored. Instead of telling you how to do a job that some of you have been doing for decades, in the face of ferocious pushback, I’d like to ask you a question that I often ask myself: Why are we doing this work?
Why would you stand in the way of the oligarchs, instead of shaking their thieving hands and smiling? Instead of confronting the corrupt, and being accused of hurting Ukraine's war effort, why not get a job singing their praises?That’s what they do at Russia Today, Sputnik, and others. I still don’t understand why journalists would work for them. I don’t understand the journalists who sold Brexit to the British, leaving them isolated and impoverished.
Let’s accept it: There is nothing inherently noble in the profession of journalism, no guarantee that committing it will make you a better person, or the world a better place.
I like to think that investigative reporting is different – that it’s aimed, precisely, at making sure the world is less cruel and ugly tomorrow than it is today. It’s an illusion – of course there are vile and corrupted people in our ranks, too – but a useful one.
Among other things, it enables you to ask, who else wants a kinder world? Investigating that question means that you stop trying to convince everyone and anyone that you know the truth, which you never will, and to start looking for people who care about the truth in the first place. Forget persuading fools and liars to become smart and truthful; focus on identifying communities where integrity matters.
When I began in this work in the 1970s, our role was to perfect democracy. The assumption, especially in the US, was that if people knew what was going on, the system would respond to that knowledge with reform. This was called the “mobilization model” of investigative journalism.
Today, more and more, our job is to save democracy – from disinformation, from corruption on an unprecedented scale, and from the naked use of force to subjugate unwilling populations. In that way we are no longer neutral observers, we’re activists. By telling the truth about tyrants, by documenting their crimes, we complicate or even undo their plans, and reveal them as weak.
We can’t do that alone. Our job is not only to find the facts, it’s to find those people who haven’t been corrupted, and to join them. We bring them together, make them stronger, help them survive and punish the corrupt. This is called the “coalition model” of journalism. It was developed in the early 1990s by David L. Protess and co-authors in a landmark book, The Journalism of Outrage. We are still working out its implications. Do we join with prosecutors? With NGOs? With businesses? Under what conditions? There is no one right way to make these alliances. But they must be made, because our survival depends on them.
Five decades ago, the principal threats faced by investigative reporters were psychological, at least in the US, UK and France. Rarely were reporters killed. Even more rarely were they sent to prison. They could be, and often were, sued for libel, or blacklisted (it happened to me in France), but there were ways to manage those risks. Today, the assassination of reporters – including environmental and labor activists – is no longer rare. The indictment and incarceration of journalists, in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and other nations, is standard operating procedure for autocrats. The risks of libel judgments have risen as well.
Ukraine was a laboratory for this shift. The murder of Georgy Gongadze in 2000 was a global landmark in the assault on journalism. Before long, repeated attempts to capture the Kyiv Post, the international voice of free Ukraine, alerted us to the vital importance that even a small media outlet could possess. Its rebirth as the Kyiv Independent mattered greatly. So did the emergence of other independent Ukrainian-language media.
If you’re smart enough to be an investigative reporter, you’re smart enough to know you won’t get rich doing it. Few of us will be famous, and even if it happens, as Marcus Aurelius noted long ago, fame doesn’t last.
But there are at least three rewards that you will certainly obtain.
The first is that nothing is more important than sharing the company of people you admire. I don’t mean the admiration born of envy or fear. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that people admired Hitler because it was easier than admitting they were terrified by him. I mean the admiration that comes from appreciating courage, intelligence, and the desire to make the world less cutthroat tomorrow than it is today. Hitler’s production chief, Albert Speer, wrote that the Fuhrer’s dinner table was the most boring place on Earth. I have almost never been bored in the company of investigative journalists.
The second was written by the American poet e.e. cummings: “There is some shit I will not eat.” Our adversaries include people like Steve Bannon, the âme damné of Donald Trump, who said that the way to win in politics is to “flood the zone with shit”. It is no coincidence that Prigozhin rose in Putin’s estimation by creating a troll factory. Our work exposes their shit for what it is. It would be even more depressing to watch the liars continue without someone contesting them; even more lonely to disappear into a crowd of ignorant, submissive subjects of these corrupt princes.
The third reward is the gratitude of people who are capable of accepting the story you are capable of finding. It’s an unforgettable moment in the life of a journalist – when someone says to you, “Thanks for telling the truth.” Certainly it’s our job, at least in principle. But it’s not a job that anyone is obliged to do, and it’s not easy to do, for reasons you know very well. If you do such a thing just once in your life, you become someone else, someone who is better than you ever thought you could be, someone worthy of the best company.
Thank you for sharing your company with me. I hope it will not be the last time, and that the next time follows Russia’s defeat. Slava Ukraini.
-- Mark Lee Hunter
Why would you stand in the way of the oligarchs, instead of shaking their thieving hands and smiling? Instead of confronting the corrupt, and being accused of hurting Ukraine's war effort, why not get a job singing their praises?That’s what they do at Russia Today, Sputnik, and others. I still don’t understand why journalists would work for them. I don’t understand the journalists who sold Brexit to the British, leaving them isolated and impoverished.
Let’s accept it: There is nothing inherently noble in the profession of journalism, no guarantee that committing it will make you a better person, or the world a better place.
I like to think that investigative reporting is different – that it’s aimed, precisely, at making sure the world is less cruel and ugly tomorrow than it is today. It’s an illusion – of course there are vile and corrupted people in our ranks, too – but a useful one.
Among other things, it enables you to ask, who else wants a kinder world? Investigating that question means that you stop trying to convince everyone and anyone that you know the truth, which you never will, and to start looking for people who care about the truth in the first place. Forget persuading fools and liars to become smart and truthful; focus on identifying communities where integrity matters.
When I began in this work in the 1970s, our role was to perfect democracy. The assumption, especially in the US, was that if people knew what was going on, the system would respond to that knowledge with reform. This was called the “mobilization model” of investigative journalism.
Today, more and more, our job is to save democracy – from disinformation, from corruption on an unprecedented scale, and from the naked use of force to subjugate unwilling populations. In that way we are no longer neutral observers, we’re activists. By telling the truth about tyrants, by documenting their crimes, we complicate or even undo their plans, and reveal them as weak.
We can’t do that alone. Our job is not only to find the facts, it’s to find those people who haven’t been corrupted, and to join them. We bring them together, make them stronger, help them survive and punish the corrupt. This is called the “coalition model” of journalism. It was developed in the early 1990s by David L. Protess and co-authors in a landmark book, The Journalism of Outrage. We are still working out its implications. Do we join with prosecutors? With NGOs? With businesses? Under what conditions? There is no one right way to make these alliances. But they must be made, because our survival depends on them.
Five decades ago, the principal threats faced by investigative reporters were psychological, at least in the US, UK and France. Rarely were reporters killed. Even more rarely were they sent to prison. They could be, and often were, sued for libel, or blacklisted (it happened to me in France), but there were ways to manage those risks. Today, the assassination of reporters – including environmental and labor activists – is no longer rare. The indictment and incarceration of journalists, in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and other nations, is standard operating procedure for autocrats. The risks of libel judgments have risen as well.
Ukraine was a laboratory for this shift. The murder of Georgy Gongadze in 2000 was a global landmark in the assault on journalism. Before long, repeated attempts to capture the Kyiv Post, the international voice of free Ukraine, alerted us to the vital importance that even a small media outlet could possess. Its rebirth as the Kyiv Independent mattered greatly. So did the emergence of other independent Ukrainian-language media.
If you’re smart enough to be an investigative reporter, you’re smart enough to know you won’t get rich doing it. Few of us will be famous, and even if it happens, as Marcus Aurelius noted long ago, fame doesn’t last.
But there are at least three rewards that you will certainly obtain.
The first is that nothing is more important than sharing the company of people you admire. I don’t mean the admiration born of envy or fear. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that people admired Hitler because it was easier than admitting they were terrified by him. I mean the admiration that comes from appreciating courage, intelligence, and the desire to make the world less cutthroat tomorrow than it is today. Hitler’s production chief, Albert Speer, wrote that the Fuhrer’s dinner table was the most boring place on Earth. I have almost never been bored in the company of investigative journalists.
The second was written by the American poet e.e. cummings: “There is some shit I will not eat.” Our adversaries include people like Steve Bannon, the âme damné of Donald Trump, who said that the way to win in politics is to “flood the zone with shit”. It is no coincidence that Prigozhin rose in Putin’s estimation by creating a troll factory. Our work exposes their shit for what it is. It would be even more depressing to watch the liars continue without someone contesting them; even more lonely to disappear into a crowd of ignorant, submissive subjects of these corrupt princes.
The third reward is the gratitude of people who are capable of accepting the story you are capable of finding. It’s an unforgettable moment in the life of a journalist – when someone says to you, “Thanks for telling the truth.” Certainly it’s our job, at least in principle. But it’s not a job that anyone is obliged to do, and it’s not easy to do, for reasons you know very well. If you do such a thing just once in your life, you become someone else, someone who is better than you ever thought you could be, someone worthy of the best company.
Thank you for sharing your company with me. I hope it will not be the last time, and that the next time follows Russia’s defeat. Slava Ukraini.
-- Mark Lee Hunter