Why Journalism Matters
Feminist newsrooms making a difference around the world, Ukrainian journalists investigate how Russia has stolen children since the invasion, and reporters fighting for the forest in Cameroon.
4 minute read
Women taking the lead in Journalism in Global South
“When women participate in the economy, everyone benefits. When women participate in peace-making and peace-keeping, we are all safer and more secure. And when women participate in politics of their nations they can make a difference.” —Hillary Clinton, 2013
Oh, and did anyone mention journalism?
Around the world, feminist-led newsrooms are bringing a challenging and important perspective to the way we see society and human relations. This is the story of four young news organisations led by women across continents, and the difference they are making.
As everyone should know by now, 2024 is one of the most important years for elections and democracy globally, with more than 4 billion people eligible to vote in countries as diverse as the United States, India, Indonesia, Russia, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Mexico, and South Africa. There will also be elections for the European parliament.
Although this may be a pulsing signal of the strength of democratic principles, those principles are under increasing threat, externally by powerful authoritarian regimes, and internally from organisations bent on gaining power by subverting democratic institutions.
But women—and feminist voices and news outlets— are playing a crucial role in championing democracy, tolerance and diversity. As feminist author and attorney Jennifer Weiss Wolf wrote recently in Ms magazine: “It is [in feminist media] where you will find the voices best able to call out and counter the rise in anti-democratic impulses and action that is growing all around us.”
Writing and broadcasting in different different languages, Brazil’s AzMina, Uganda’s HerStory, Nigeria’s BONews Service and Nepal’s Boju Bajai are leading the way for a new generation of women editors and reporters working in the Global South.
These four outlets were the subject of an insightful profile written in January by freelance journalist Laura Oliver for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism based in the UK. She describes female journalists playing an ‘existential role’ at this crucial time in history.
The Nepali feminist outlet Boju Bajai started in 2016 as a podcast, co-founded by veteran journalist Bhrikuti Rai who has worked for the Nepali Times, the Kathmandu Post and and the Los Angeles Times. Rai met her co-founder poet Itisha Giri during rehearsals for the Vagina Monologues.
Rai explained her reasons for setting up Boju Bajai to Oliver: “The news media did not prioritise or have the space for issues that affected us as women. It's overwhelmingly men who run the newsrooms in Nepal.”
According to Nigerian journalist and media consultant Blessing Oladunjoye, there’s a gender angle to every topic. She founded BONews Service in Lagos in 2018 and soon discovered that collaborating with advocacy groups is the way for small microoutlets to survive and thrive. BONews focusses on issues affecting children and disabled people.
Big newsrooms
“There are big newsrooms in Nigeria so it’s easier for them to get attention, but working with advocacy groups helps BONews give women a voice,” she said.
AzMina is group radically different from other journalism outlets in Brazil. AzMina is a majority ‘black, non-white’ newsroom’ which they believe better reflects the demographic realities of modern-day Brazil. where the most recent census data indicates that more than 50% of the country’s population now identifies as people of colour.
Founder Carolina Oms was a high profile business journalist before setting up AzMina in 2015. She describes AzMina as the ‘first feminist media in Brazil’ and explains it was launched because the mainstream media in Brazil were not reflecting news from a feminist perspective.
Crime of passion
“Newspapers would still call femicide a crime of passion. The women on the covers of magazines all looked alike and the discussion about sexuality was centred around men. We want to do investigative work and solutions journalism for women in which they can see themselves.”
AzMina has many young readers, 15 year-olds who enjoy sharing and engaging with the content. The outlet has made two documentaries which were shown in schools. But according to Oliver’s report AzMina has also had its critics, including a government minister who tried to close it down.
Oliver writes: “In 2019, Brazil’s then minister for women, family, and human rights filed a complaint with the public prosecutor’s office following an article on safe methods for obtaining abortions.
“ Team members’ photos and home addresses were doxxed and the website was taken offline. The newsroom has strong digital security protocols after suffering numerous cyberattacks, including DDoS attacks.”
According to Herstory’s Culton Scovia the problem in Uganda is the lack of space given to the coverage of women’s issues.
“It is not that women do not want to comment on these issues or that we do not have female experts in this kind of field,” she said. “You [newsroom editors] do not approach them, you do not reach out to them.”
Security and funding remain a problem for all these outlets who still struggle as ‘niche’ businesses subsisting on shoe-string budgets and small if dedicated audiences.
But whatever the challenges and limitations the feminist focus is still making an impact.
Oliver writes: “In Brazil, says Oms, things have changed for the better: another major print title calls itself feminist now and gender violence has risen on the public discourse agenda.”
Reference
Reuters Institute report on Feminist newsrooms
4 minute read
Despite the constant dangers, journalists managed to investigate the story of how Russians stole the children of Ukraine
Since Russia’s first incursion into the Ukraine in 2014 more than 68 journalists have been killed in the country.
There is now constant danger from either being in the line of fire on the front line or from mined areas in the formerly occupied zones. Add to that the constant threat of Russian missile or drone attacks, often targeting civilian homes and facilities.
According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) Ukrainian investigative journalists are also hampered by lack of access to public information because data bases are closed, with the government citing wartime security.
The Kyiv government has evidence of at least 20,000 children being taken to Russia, but human rights organisations and professionals working on restoring children to their families think the real figure is likely to be more than 100,000.
Multiple outlets
Multiple journalism outlets have been investigating the situation. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty looked at leaked emails and other documents as well as getting witness statements to identify and and name suspects thought to have been involved in the forced deportation of children from the occupied districts of the Donetsk region.
Slidstvo.Info is one of Ukraine’s longest established groups of investigative journalists. An element of their wartime coverage has focussed on identifying Russian military and Ukrainian collaborators. They have established the alleged identities of individuals likely to have kidnapped 15 orphans from the Mykolaiv region. Slidstvo.info has also investigated “local collaborators” that helped abduct orphan babies from a children’s hospital in Kherson during Russia’s nine-month occupation of the city.
But perhaps the most compelling coverage has come from one of Ukraine’s newest journalistic outlets, The Kyiv Independent, an English language publication founded in 2021 by the former staff of the Kyiv Post (See WJM July 24, 2023)
The Kyiv Independent team painstakingly collected documents and eyewitness testimonies to produce a video investigation entitled Uprooted, a study of the fate of dozens of children taken from Mariupol. This is the Independent’s first feature investigative film in which they found that ‘Russia systematically abducts Ukrainian children from the occupied territories, trying to brainwash them and place them with Russian families’.
As a result of all of these revelations The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner on child rights on allegations of organising the abductions.
(Child abduction and deportation is considered a severe violation of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. It is one of the five prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention of 1948.)
In the Independent investigation Alexander Khrebet writes: “Russia subverted the social services, medical facilities and children’s centres in Donetsk Oblast, using them in its kidnapping scheme. Children were deported from Donetsk to the other occupied territories and kept in hospitals.
“Some were then deported to Russia under the pretext of "recovery," but they were placed with Russian families, camps, or orphanages instead, according to the investigation.”
The Kyiv Independent has also identified some of the Russian families who have adopted children illegally.
Aganst the odds Some children managed to return to Ukraine with the aid of charities and the persistent efforts of their parents or guardians.
Fear and control
But as Khrebet explains in his report: “…those who still remain in Russia face difficulties in expressing their will to return due to fear and control.”
The Kyiv Independent also discovered that medical facilities in Donetsk were crucial for enabling deportation of children to Russia. Mariupol children were kept in at least nine hospitals in the Russian-occupied city.
The Independent spoke to Daria Kasyanova, program director of the charity SOS Children's Villages.
“Kasyanova says that when Mariupol children without guardians were discovered by the Russian military, they would be taken to filtration camps, social and psychological rehabilitation centres, and in many cases to hospitals in occupied territory.
“Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Centre for Human Rights, says this ‘gave Russia a trump card, that allegedly the children are in a medical institution for medical reasons.’
"In reality, (hospitals were) the points from where the children were distributed further," Rashevska says.
Reference
GIJN: Best investigative stories in Ukrainian
Kyiv Independent video investigation, Uprooted
4 minute read
Illegal forest destruction in Cameroon highlights the threats faced by indigenous people and investigative journalists
As well as a longer term danger to life on our planet, environmental crime is also a threat to indigenous people and the journalists who try to uncover it.
WJM readers will recall our coverage of the murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and his companion, indigenous activist Bruno Pereira in the Brazil Amazon in June 2022. They were investigating illegal fishing in a remote area when they were killed. (WJM July 1 2022)
The present Brazilian government is greatly concerned about the growth of organised crime in the Amazon which began to boom under the previous Bolsonaro regime.
But Brazil is not the only place where journalists find themselves in the crosshairs when covering the devastation of the world’s major rainforests.
According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network Cameroon in the Congo basin in Africa also represents a dangerous place to report on. There, journalists routinely face the risk of abduction, torture, and killing. Well known journalist and radio presenter Martinez Zogo was murdered in Cameroon in 2023 following the killing of Samuel Wazizi in 2019.
Dangerous mission
And so it was a dangerous mission undertaken by two brave female journalists from Le Monde and Afrocongo (a journalistic outlet dedicated to investigating crime and corruption in the region) when they journeyed to Cameroon last year to uncover the web of illegal logging in the country which is at the heart of the world’s second biggest rainforest in the Congo basin.
Josiane Kouagheu and Madeleine Ngeunga investigated illegal timber trafficking in the Cameroonian part of the rainforest. They collected data and witnessed criminal logging truck shipments that in some cases implicated high-ranking military officers.
(Much of Cameroon’s illegal timber finds its way to Vietnam and China where few questions are asked about its origin.)
The reporters also spoke to many of the native indigenous people who said they received little from the government’s legal forestry operations and therefore had resorted to working with illegal loggers who paid the communities cash to log illegal species of tree in areas officially banned from logging operations.
Dangers and dilemmas
The following passage from one of the Afrocongo reports highlights the dangers and dilemmas facing Cameroon’s indigenous tribes living in the forest.
“Along a winding track lined with tall grass in Nkollo, a village in the heart of the Congo Basin forests in the southern region of Cameroon, is parked an old truck. All around, Bagyeli, the indigenous forest people who live by hunting, fishing, and gathering, commonly known as Pygmies (a term they consider pejorative), go about their business.
“The truck, filled with sawn wood, has been parked there for several days. “It is carrying Bibolo, and it has broken down,” explains Mathias Kouma, a 34-year-old Bagyeli leader. The vehicle has no license plate and does not belong to any legal company recognized by the country’s Ministry of Forestry.
“The owner is a ‘warapeur’ These are illegal loggers (without official government documents) swarming in the forest areas of Cameroon, says Mathias. In complicity with the elites, local authorities, inhabitants, and traditional chiefs, these operators arrive to extract wood in a specific area. The cutting of the targeted species lasts for days or even weeks. In return, some “warapeurs” pay a financial sum to the entire village via the development committee or other local organizations representing the villagers.
“According to Mathias, the sums range from 25,000 to more than 250,000 CFA francs, depending on the species and quantity. In the villages visited by Le Monde and InfoCongo, almost all the inhabitants acknowledge that “illegal logging brings us more money than legal logging.”
“It is only the illegal exploitation that brings something here in the village since legally, we see nothing,” maintains a leader of Nkollo, one of the boroughs of the Lokoundje council, who requested anonymity.”
The Le Monde-Infocongo collaboration was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, a dynamic organisation that ‘believes in the power of journalism, education, and public outreach to create real-world change’.
Reference
Pulitzer Center Rainforest Investigations Network
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