Paying the Price of Democracy

During the last 2 weeks, I had a different experience in my journey to learn techniques of investigative journalism.

I joined a team of propublica journalists who investigate problems happened to home owners who had Chinese drywall in their houses.

Although my role in the team is minor, it is enough to notice what is happening and how the journalists play their role as watchdogs for the whole society.

The first thing I learned is to form a timeline for the whole crisis that hit American home owners in more than 13 states.

The great thing about forming timelines in investigative journalism that its role in not only to tell the readers what happened in a chronicle order as I used to do when I was in Cairo but also to find out as many details as possible about which governmental agency moved before the other and after how long time they put their plans into action.

The timeline reveals too the actions made by victims or civil society organizations and it gives the audience and the journalist the ability to judge and evaluate how is responsible for any crisis and which factors affected and when was the time of involvement of everyone.

It was a great chance for me to learn how the freedom of information act can be implemented as my colleagues managed in getting all the governmental documents related to the angle of their investigation including official mail between different agencies.

In addition to the official documents, the research power of investigative journalism enabled the team to have all media clips published about the same issue since the beginning of the crisis using searching software.

After collecting all this material journalists like me and my colleagues “had to pay the price of democracy” as I said in my own words to my colleagues.

We found ourselves facing at least 20,000 page of documents related to the crisis, and we had to set some targets to determine what type of information we need from these documents.

My main task in the last 2 weeks was to go through these documents, highlight information and to make suggestions on what can help us reach better results.

After weeks of work I told my colleagues my joke “ I hate democracy, because in some cases when democracy is not there a journalist will be very satisfied to publish a one page press release from a governmental officer about any issue, while knowing that this is the best amount of information he can get”.

Seriously, having laws that allow people to know all information available for governmental officials is a huge responsibility on American journalists and it simply means that they have no excuse to stop producing investigative journalism whatever factors affecting the industry.

And it means that journalists in many countries around the world have to fight to get the same right for the sake of the public.