 Journalism is not really a profession in the true sense because it does not meet any code of conduct or standards. Of course, it's expected to do well, but there's no regulation or even self-regulation so far as journalism is concerned, or very little of it, unlike professions like the law, like accounting, medicine and so on, where certain standards are prescribed and there is a regulatory framework where you're supposed to be held to account. Disciplining journalism is a very difficult business but there are attempts to increasingly raise professional standards and there are journalism schools and so forth which attempt to do that. But what is journalism? It's easily recognized but it's very hard to define. And journalism as it has evolved in modern times is probably best understood, and I quote from a definition here, from Professor Adam Stewart, it's best understood as a form of expression or brain work that includes making news judgments, gathering evidence, constructing narratives and, very important, making sense of things. A form of expression or brain work that includes making news judgments, gathering evidence, constructing narratives or storytelling and making sense of things. And also as a method of capturing and representing the world of events and ideas as they occur. There are many cynical characterizations of journalism, that's literature in a hurry, the pursuit of superficiality and deletantism for the most part and so on, and I won't go into that. But in a serious sense it is what this definition I think will do. In an interesting book, a significant book, British journalist who is also taught journalism at City University London and elsewhere, George Brock is a veteran journalist in his book called Out of Print, Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News. He identifies four core tasks of journalism, journalism for the 21st century. And I think most people, most journalists would agree with it, whichever priority, however you prioritize it. And these four core tasks are verification, journalism is often called the discipline of verification, but it has to go beyond that, sense making, bearing witness and investigation. So verification in no particular order, verification, sense making, bearing witness and investigation. And Brock rightly characterizes these four as the irreducible core of what can be distinguished as journalism and the foundation of on which journalism in the 20th century is going to be rebuilt. So journalism can be understood as investigation, at least in large part. And over the last half century or so, there has been an ebb and flow of investigative journalism across the world, including of course in India. Related to this, but separate from it, there has been an ebb and flow of public and political engagement with the results of investigative journalism in response to larger events, trends and issues in politics, economy, culture, society and of course international relations. Now the next question that arises, what is investigative journalism? When it comes to definition, there is a surprising lack of agreement among practitioners and scholars in the field. But let us cut through all this and agree on the proposition that investigative journalism is the discipline of digging deep and bringing to light verified facts about wrongdoing or about a matter of significance which are either sought to be covered up or are otherwise inaccessible to the public. Investigative journalism is often largely about wrongdoing, investigating and exposing wrongdoing. But it is more than that. There could be a situation of mass distress leading to starvation deaths. It's happened in India and Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere and often the symptoms are silent and only when it reaches a crisis point do the media get interested in the matter or start reporting it and then investigation may start. So there are matters of significance not always amounting to wrongdoing that get missed but there is active cover up as well. So I think let us agree on this simple proposition. Gabriel Garcia Marquez who started out as a journalist and remained engaged with journalism and journalism education all his life has a clear view on the central role of investigation in journalism. Interestingly it's a viewpoint shared by many old world journalists. In a wonderful little meditation titled Journalism The Best Job in the World, not many would agree with that but Marquez emphasized that journalism is the best job in the world even though he went much beyond journalism and this was delivered in Los Angeles in 1996 and the writer puts forward the view that the education and training of young journalists must quote, rest on three pillars, three central pillars, the priority of aptitudes and vocations. There must be a passion for the vocation. There must be an aptitude which is passionate, which is committed. It is deeply engaged. The certainty that investigation is not a professional specialty but that all journalism should be by definition investigative and the awareness that ethics are not an occasional condition but should always accompany journalism like the bus accompanies the blow fly. That's like the bus accompanies the blow fly. So Marquez in other words tried to demystify the business of investigative journalism because very often investigative journalists claim to be an elite carder in journalism that they do what garden variety journalists don't attempt to do or are not capable of doing and Marquez would have none of that and it's not just him, a number of old world journalists who share this view and in fact the term investigative journalism was not known at all for a long time till the 70s or so when the Watergate scandal broke and there were great investigative journalists before that. For example the Sunday Times in the UK had the Insight team and many injustices and horrors were exposed before that and also in India you had quite a lot of investigative journalism in the late 19th century and the early 20th century as part of the freedom struggle exposing the scandals of the British Raj but they were not labelled investigative journalism so there's much merit in the proposition that all serious journalism has to be investigated and it's not some super speciality in journalism but this doesn't mean that there should be no specialization in fact increasingly investigative journalists need to specialize and master various techniques and tools data journalism and forensic accounting, forensic architecture, data visualization and so on these are at least frontier fields today not yet been mainstream but they are able to discover things that normally are hidden but at the center of it is a question of meaning and without merely amassing facts on issues that doesn't get you anywhere and it's just routine work but as long as fact gathering, verification is followed up by analyzing, analysis and attempting to make sense of the story apart from storytelling I think that's where investigative journalism takes off so while investigating, exploring and experimenting journalists of the first rank are not satisfied with bringing to light a mass of material facts that they managed to unearth through diligent work or that falls under their lap very often it's a luck, it's a stroke of luck their real pursuit should be to invest these hitherto concealed or inaccessible facts with social, moral and often historical meaning and weave them into a coherent and compelling story so that the journalism contributes significantly to raising social awareness of the issues involved and also stands the test of time and I can give you a couple of examples, a little known story by Marquez called the story of a shipwrecked sailor when the young journalist Marquez's story of Velasco originally published in a Columbia newspaper and Kansiburo Oe's Hiroshima Notes which began in 1963 as an on the spot report for a monthly magazine and was completed in 1965 these are unlikely to find a place in case studies and textbooks but as investigative reporting hard worked meticulously researched, imaginatively conceived and beautifully written they certainly will stand the test of time both one the Nobel among other things I would argue for the wide angle approach to investigation it does not mean that as I said news organization should not increase investigative bench strength in fact on the contrary as Brock points out this is going to be increasingly important in the journalism of the future which faces many challenges and there's a place for forming special investigative teams newspapers like The Guardian, The New York Times do devote considerable resources to developing these resources within their newsrooms but it does mean that the larger pool of journalists educated and trained in the precepts and practice of quality journalism can be drawn into the task of investigation a larger number than current professional practice allows motivating and empowering this greatly enlarge pool of young women and men to do thorough thoughtful and carefully supervised investigations into subjects of social and moral significance could have dramatic effects I believe in terms of developing capabilities improving work culture and raising quality in the profession now I will turn to more specifically to the Indian situation and what the challenges to all journalism but particularly investigative journalism in particular are about there was a time when I believed and proclaimed in various forums that when it came to freedom of speech and expression and by extension the freedom and independence and general state of the press India was in an enviable position certainly in relation to every other developing country that was about 40 years ago and the socio-political and as a prominent part of it the news media environment seemed more open more capacious and more welcoming than it had been at any time anyone could recall in post-independent India the polity seemed to be unusually open to a choice of directions and paths it might take English language as well as Indian language daily newspapers and magazines liberated from their enslavement an inglorious role during the authoritarian emergency of 1975-77 seemed eager and energized to take full advantage of the new opportunities that had opened up especially for Indian language newspapers and there were opportunities for accelerated and expansive growth relatively unfettered functioning and unaccustomed commercial success a phenomenon described by the political scientist Robin Jeffery as India's newspaper revolution he wrote a book on it and even more importantly for significant sections of the mainstream press there were opportunities for playing a more meaningful energetic and effective role in the striving for a democratic progressive and just society it was a time most newspapers journalists and their representative bodies were unusually vigilant against any encroachment on their entitlements and status as a so-called fourth estate but if I were to claim anything like that today I would be accused or be vulnerable to the charge of pervading fake news or disinformation if I claim that India is in an unenviable position when it comes to freedom and independence of the media I think I would be justly accused of pervading fake news or disinformation when we speak of the state of the press in a country the factor that readily comes to mind is freedom freedom from any kind of oppressive or arbitrary interference by the state and its instrumentalities such interference can take the form of suppression, censorship, intimidation, violence and any kind of unreasonable regulation legal or otherwise which has a negative or chilling effect on free speech it can also take the form of authoritarian control by communal or extremist elements and I don't want to get into too much detail or names here but you know that there is an overarching climate of intimidation and fear in India today and very often journalists hold their hand, there is what is known as self-censorship there used to be, you know, Humpert Wolfe said this about the British journalist, only half in jest and it goes something like this, you can't hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist but considering what the man will do unasked there is no occasion to and that I think fits such a situation very well today the outcome is not just an overall press and news media at least for a large part but manufactured consent and crawling when you are only asked to bend on a scale not seen since the emergency to use a famous phrase that Mr. L.K. Adwani used about the performance of the Indian press during the emergency you crawled when you are only asked to bend because that was said earlier by somebody else but it fitted that situation and I think today we are resembling something like that although there is some resistance, I'll come to that in a minute all this has not escaped the attention of close foreign observers of the Indian press for example, Max Rodenbeck, South Asia bureau chief for the economists, former chief observed that the government had aggressively and quite effectively bullied much of India's mainstream press into towing the party line and Rasmus Nielsen who is director of the Reuters institute for the study of journalism and Oxford has also commented on the creeping quiet spreading across India's otherwise loud and lively journalism and there are any number of articles in the foreign press on this subject but more seriously if you look at this is not just a new phenomenon, it's got worse but this has been in the making for quite a long time in 2018 India ranked 138th from the bottom among 180 countries and territories figuring in the annual world press freedom index by reporters without boundaries, Paris based independent organization that dedicates itself to freedom of information in a comparative reckoning where the worst score was 88.87 and the best 7.63 India's score was 43.24 exactly the same as Pakistan's and RSF if you can look it up, it gives you know it discusses the issue why and so on it's not just one organization that has given India such a poor ranking but it's virtual consensus on this but the bad news does not stop here the committee to protect journalists known as CPJ after careful enquiry and strict verification has documented the work related killings of 1,354 journalists worldwide including 15 India since 1992 that was the year the New York based independent non-profit founded in 1981 to defend journalists worldwide from danger and the fear of reprisal began to compile data on journalistic fatalities across the world of the 50 killed in India since 1992, 35 were murdered in retribution for or to prevent news coverage or commentary and the remaining 15 lost their lives while on dangerous assignments or on crossfire so we're talking largely about journalists killed or murdered in connection with their work not in some private dispute and this has been strictly verified and documented a breakdown of the subjects covered by the murdered Indian journalists is interesting and revealing is grim in fact politics 20 corruption 21 crime 11 there's an overlap some journalists cover more than one subject human rights eight and so on the numbers add up to more than the total shown because many of the targeted journalists as I mentioned covered more than one subject but it's notable that politics that those who report reporters who covered politics corruption and crime figured heavily in the list while no correlation can be detected between the murders and the governments in place in the states and at the center between 1992 and 2018 it is significant that the overwhelming majority of the murders were committed against journalists reporting as I said on these subjects but the CPJ's research does suggest that communal and other forms of divisive politics and social polarization across India have made the situation worse 10 journalists were murdered across India over the decade beginning May 2004 but in the four years beginning to May 2014 we've already seen the death toll rise by another 12 and it is not as though only defenseless local reporters working in remote locations have been targeted by the killers experienced journalists like Gauri Lankesh and Sujath Bukhari writing against communalism or investigating corruption or working for influential news media are also part of the rising toll which suggests that journalist murders might be going through a process of deadly normalization in the system and here is a quick I'll just quickly go through this list of murdered Indian journalists from May 2014 Tarun Kumar Acharya, a stringer for a local Uriya language television channel and a local newspaper his body was found with his throat slit and injuries and his chest in a desolate area in Orissa MVN Shankar, a senior journalist working for Andhra Prabha at Telugu Daily died in hospital after being beaten with iron rods in Guntur district in November 2014 Jagendra Singh, a freelance journalist writing for Hindi newspapers and on Facebook died in a Lucknow hospital with terrible burn injuries after being doused with petrol and set on fire allegedly by a police officer who raided his house in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh Karun Mishra, a bureau chief of Hindi newspaper, mortally wounded while travelling in a car by gunshots from three assailants on motorbikes in Sultanpur district, Uttar Pradesh Rajdev Ranjan, a bureau chief for a Hindi daily, shot dead at close range as he was returning to his office in Bihar in Sivan Bihar Gauri Lankesh, editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrika, gunned down as she was entering a home in Bengaluru in September 2017 Rajesh Mishra, stringer for the leading Hindi daily, Dainik Jagran, shot dead by assailants on motorcycles while he was outside his brother's store in Brahmanpur, a town in Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh Sudeep Dutta Baumik, an investigative reporter working for the local Bengali newspaper, shot dead at point blank range at a battalion headquarters near Agartala Tripura by a trooper allegedly under the orders of a Tripura Strait Rifles Commandant Navin Nishchal, a stringer for the leading Hindi daily, Dainik Bhaskar, deliberately run over by a sports utility vehicle while riding a motorcycle on a highway in Bihar, 2018 March Sandeep Sharma, a reporter for News World, a local television channel, deliberately run over by a truck while he was riding his motorcycle in Madhya Pradesh, it's quite well spread out, isn't it? Bin District in March of 2018 Sujata Bukari, a former Kashmir correspondent of the Hindu and the editor of Rising Kashmir, shot dead near his office in Srinagar in June 2018 and the last one Chandan Tiwari of Aaj newspaper who was abducted, brutally beaten up and died in Jharkhand So I think there's plenty of evidence to show that journalism and particularly investigative journalism in India is a very dangerous pursuit especially if you're in a small town and defenceless, you may be working for a small newspaper or television station or for a big newspaper like Dainik Jagaran and so on, or you could be an editor also, but you are vulnerable wherever you are and now I think as I said, it looks like it's becoming normalized What is as shocking as the rising number of journalist fatalities and proliferating violence against them is the fact that the killers and assailants regularly go unpunished This impunity is a phenomenon not just in India, but also in several other developing countries where authoritarian rulers, typically elected and functioning under the cloak of democracy and extremist political movements have little time and tolerance for independent journalism, especially investigative journalism or journalism as investigation Investigative journalists especially are targeted as enemies of the state or of the party or of the individual political leader or of the extremist movement Since 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists has been publishing an annual Global Impunity Index a quantified ranking of countries where journalists are murdered, the cases remain unsolved and no convictions have been obtained In other words, the index is a graded indictment of countries where the rule of law does not seem to apply when journalists are murdered in the course of their work and the 14 countries appearing in the latest index which came out in 2018 account for close to 80% these 14 countries of the unsolved murders of journalists worldwide for the decade ending, August 31, 2017 India along with six other countries has figured in the Global Impunity Index every year since the index began to be compiled It can thus be described as a founding member, a permanent member of this club of shame In December 2013, responding to campaigns by journalists, journalist unions and professional associations and organizations like the CPJ the UN General Assembly established November 2nd as the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists and this day has been observed actively by organizations of working journalists around the world This reflects growing alarm and anxiety over the safety of India, safety of journalists and governments, security establishments and even judicial authorities in India have been distressingly insensitive to the seriousness of this issue The CPJ's Impunity Index is released annually on every November 2nd and soon we will have this report for 2019 and its latest report calls attention to the fact that as I said the 14 countries that figure in the list 5 of them have failed to respond to the UNESCO Director General's request for information on the status of investigations into the journalist murders Who are the 5 countries? India, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and South Sudan Ending the state of impunity and the underlying lack of accountability must be taken up as a democratic task of the highest priority So I think the main challenge before investigative journalism is this question of fear, danger to investigative reporter Often they are abducted, tortured to send a message and then murdered This is an international phenomenon but unfortunately India seems to be in the thick of it Along with countries that the company is quite shocking There are other internal challenges to investigative journalism It's not just the external threat what I have been talking about But let me take up two problematic issues that face reporters who investigate sensitive subjects One is the frequent almost endemic resort to deception And secondly dealing with anonymous and confidential sources Now it is true that virtually every investigative journalist practices deception in some form In the sense you don't let those who are investigating know what you are up to If you can manage that So some element, some degree of deception is involved in virtually all of investigative journalism And any journalist who claims that I am completely straightforward with sources that would have to be dumb Would not succeed in anything So deception of some kind, you can only justify it by saying it's for the greater good It's for getting something more valuable which would justify or rationalize what you have done You don't show your hand in other words, you are not quite straightforward So there is an endemic resort to deception And then there is a problem of dealing with anonymous and confidential sources The generally agreed rules, at least my rules And this is not original, I think they have been worked out over time by many good journalists But the rules I would advocate and practice relating to the use of deception in investigation are quite clear The problem is with their implementation or other enforcement in newsrooms, how do you enforce these rules? The first rule prohibits resort to deception unless it becomes clear that the information sought by the journalist On a matter of significance cannot be obtained in a straightforward way You can't go straight and ask them to give you that information If it's about wrongdoing, tell me what you've done wrong, etc. It's not possible It has to be clear, it cannot be got in any other way than through the practice of some form of deception The second rule requires that the public interest test be applied if the deception contemplated is serious And would not be countenanced in a normal professional course There are people who go into mental asylums, sometimes claiming to be social workers or mentally ill And then they report, this has been practice in the United States They've gone into prison systems, broken the law and gone into prison and reported on what And this has resulted in very valuable, powerful material But it has to be clear that the public interest is involved in this If this deception contemplated is serious where you're pretending to be what you are not Or you're breaking the law or coming close or you're on the borderline or breaking the law The third rule lays down that any investigation that relies on deception Must be closely monitored by an editorial supervisor with sufficient experience To make calls on what is and what is not legitimate from the standpoint of professional ethics It has to be supervised, so three rules One, you couldn't have got it any other way You have to resort to this Two, there must be a public interest justification or defence for what you do if it's serious deception And three, you have to be carefully supervised If these rules are followed, I think then investigative journalism can be on a sound path And the kind of disasters that the New York Times experienced with Judith Miller and so on would be avoided And it's also happened in India The other issue that I refer to is the use and misuse of anonymous and confidential sources This is a global phenomenon, a minefield that has claimed many casualties such as Judith Miller Has also taken a toll on the public's trust in journalism But the real problem of Indian journalists today is not so much the protection of anonymous and confidential sources It is a license given to official, corporate and often privileged sources To use and abuse its columns and broadcast time hiding behind the veil of anonymity If they are free from scruples, these sources are able to wield power and influence without responsibility Promoting official agendas and special interests Attacking and at times scandalizing opponents and opposing views Planting self-serving stories and from time to time pervading just plain disinformation Disinformation must be distinguished from misinformation Scholars do it, but very often it's confused in journalism Disinformation is deliberate, intentional, malicious Misinformation happens all the time in journalism and in public discourse It is not deliberate and it can be corrected, the responses have to be quite different Since the justification for the demand for anonymity and confidentiality Is rarely questioned by reporters and since the deal struck routinely between reporter and privileged source To grant confidential status are rarely monitored and supervised properly within the newsroom The misuse of sources by journalists and what is even more damaging The misuse of journalists and the news media by privileged and powerful sources Have assumed epidemic proportions in India You can see it today on reporting on Jammu and Kashmir Where there's been a clamp down and political leaders have been detained Very little reliable reporting in the Indian press including in the Hindu and so on And the few reports that have come out increasing now You'll read them in the Guardian or the BBC or Reuters And also I must mention especially Caravan magazine which puts out long form journalism Did a very fine cover story on this and Arun Dati Roy One of our outstanding writers who contributed greatly to investigation But in a literary form has done a story on that But there are, you know, given the gravity of the situation The seriousness of what happened, I'm not getting into the details here It's just that there's been a clamp down and there's been very little Enterprising journalism, very little independent journalism Which seeks to inform readers and viewers, the audience On what has actually happened in Kashmir, is there resistance, are there casualties What is happening, how are the people taken it You can operate within the frontiers of the law and do much better Than what is being attempted today So this is a major challenge, this is where the overarching climate of fear And intimidation operates and also self-censorship which I mentioned earlier That even without being commanded to do it, you do it in advance Like these lines about the British journalists Considering what the man will do unasked, there's no occasion to I've had some experiences in investigative journalism In 1981, when I was Washington correspondent of the Hindu Government of India had entered into an extended fund facility with the International Monetary Fund At that time it was the largest multilateral loan in history It was 5 billion SDR, which was about 6 billion US dollars at that time And the agreement involved conditionalities about how India's economic policy And so on, labour reform, exchange rate management And number of other facets of economic policy And as a quid pro quo for this, the conditionalities were laid down These days these things are made public But in 1981 it was highly, it was classified, it was confidential And governments as well as the IMF were very careful in not giving out these details Again by a stroke of luck, the document fell into my hands And the Hindu was able to carry in installments In fact serialize on a virtually daily basis these documents And I think there was a lot of interest in India, it figured in parliament That was not some great feat of investigation, it was largely a stroke of luck But you have to cultivate sources to do that In the Bofors investigation, it was very long lasting This happened in, you know, the Bofors scandal broke through a broadcast By Swedish public radio in April of 1987 When it was alleged that India's purchase of howitzers from Sweden, from Bofors Involved hefty bribes paid to public servants, defence officials and others And also politicians, that is the allegation made But the Swedish media then went silent And for two years, for a whole year nothing additional came out The politicians were involved, the VP Singh, the first finance minister And later defence minister blew the whistle on another scandal and resigned On the issue of corruption And I think at that time the many journalists, people like Arun Shauri And others were in hot pursuit of the truth in this case In April of 1988, we had the Hindu struck gold Or rather Chitra Subramaniam, then Stringer and Geneva Struck gold in Sweden, got a source and were able to publish the first documents On payments, undisclosed payments disguised as commissions on a percentage basis Paid into secret Swiss bank accounts The information came little by little, not all in one go But the investigation lasted for about two or two and a half years Before you could say that there was some finality to it It showed that much was hidden There was a money trail that was tracked in this investigation And I happened to lead the investigation It was not one person's effort, it was a team of journalists working here And there were also competition from others The Indian Express contributed, India today contributed But on the whole the Hindu led this investigation And it is generally agreed that this had a significant impact on the election of 1989 And the defeat that the Rajiv Gandhi government suffered in 1989 There was still the leading party in parliament I think it would have been an exaggeration to claim that this is what brought about the downfall of the Congress government at that time There were many other issues involved, it was a complex situation But the general perception is that this had a very significant impact on the political scene and so on It's another matter that it led to nothing happening in the investigation In the legal process, in the criminal justice system And not some of the accused during that time Others, they were all acquitted There was not a single conviction in the Bofors case The lesson I drew from that was that you shouldn't bother too much about the outcome of your investigation Just do it, because very often what happens in the public sphere, in the political arena Is much more complex than journalists often imagine And it's largely outside your control So the proper task of journalism is to do the investigation and put it out there And of course you want it to have an impact in a subjective way, but you have no control over it