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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Brant Houston, 573-882-2042

Sept. 20, 2000

IRE Board Urges Action in Reporter Attack

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. has urged Canadian authorities to vigorously pursue the attackers of Montreal journalist Michel Auger, who was shot and seriously wounded last week.

Auger, a reporter for Le Journal de Montreal, was shot by unknown assailants on Sept. 13 after publishing an article on organized crime in the province of Quebec.

In a letter to Florent Gagne, General Director of the Quebec Provincial Police, IRE wrote, "We cannot help but be deeply worried by this open attack on the freedom of the press to do its important work of telling citizens about their society."

The letter also said there is "a frightening resonance in this blatant daylight attack on Mr. Auger. In 1976, one of our founding members, an investigative reporter in Arizona named Don Bolles was fatally injured when his car blew up in the middle of the day on a busy downtown Phoenix street."

Bolles had been at work on a story about land fraud schemes that involved organized crime.

In an extraordinary response, IRE brought together nearly 50 journalists and students from around the U.S. to go to Phoenix and finish Bolles' work. The journalists, who took time away from their full-time jobs, published a series on how organized crime had swept into that state.

The effort, known as the Arizona Project, also delivered a strong message that killing a journalist would not stop a story from being told.

IRE said that many of its members are writing and broadcasting stories about the Auger shooting and the police investigation into it.

IRE, based at the Missouri School of Journalism, is a nonprofit organization of about 4,500 journalists and journalism educators that includes many of the top practitioners of investigative journalism.

IRE is dedicated to educating journalists on investigative reporting techniques and upholding the highest standards of journalism.

It holds national and regional conferences, in-house and on-the-road workshops and teaches computer-assisted reporting techniques through the National Institute forComputer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of IRE and Missouri of School of Journalism.

It also provides reporting resources through its Web site at www.ire.org.

Click here to read the letter to Gagne.
Response from Montreal Police