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By Nikole Hannah-Jones | New York Times Magazine
The last year has been a particularly tumultuous one when it comes to race in the United States. We’ve seen riots in two cities following the police killings of unarmed black men. There have been nationwide protests in response to the dozens of black Americans who have died either at the hands of police or in police custody. And the Republican primary has whipped up old fears of Latino immigrants as a criminal scourge.
Reporters have been there, covering the news as it happens. But reporters have also been grappling with how to tell the deeper stories behind the flare-ups, how to do real accountability reporting about racial inequality. The desire has been evident to me as I have sat on panels discussing this very thing at several journalism conferences over the last year, and each time I have been greeted by a standing-room-only crowd.
Journalists know there are important stories to be dug up, but they struggle to do so in a meaningful way.
Investigating racial inequality is particularly tricky for journalists. It’s not something many of us have been groomed to do in our newsrooms. Until recently, people thought it pretty radical that I described my beat as investigating the ways racial inequality is created and maintained through official action and policy. Race coverage has often been marginalized in newsrooms, and it’s certainly rare to have an investigative beat built around it.
Newsrooms, and the journalists in them, have often reflected the societal view that present-day racial disparities largely result from the unforeseeable impacts of nondiscriminatory policies, past discrimination, or, in blatant cases, a few bad apples. For instance, I commonly read in a news report some throwaway sentence or another about housing segregation in a city resulting from a “legacy of discrimination.”
This is, of course, partially true, but what is also true is that the federal government and housing enforcement agencies across the country continue to find rampant discrimination among landlords, real estate agents and lenders. What’s also true is that zoning and other land-use policies passed by real people in real communities lead to segregation, as well, and that this is rarely an accident.
Part of the problem is that, though we’d prefer not to believe it, journalists hold the same racial anxieties, blind spots and assumptions as our society at large. No one wants to be called racist, so we are reticent to call out in others actions and decisions that may be influenced by race.
When white journalists grow up in largely white communities with functioning schools, responsive government, well-maintained infrastructure and a police force that treats them with respect, it makes sense that even the most skeptical among them could take it for granted that this is how America is for others, too.
Black Americans have been complaining about police brutality in their communities for years, but much of the coverage from predominantly white newsrooms favored the accounts of the very police who were being accused. It is no accident that the media’s scrutiny of policing over the last year was, at least initially, driven by civilians’ cell phone video footage that directly contradicted police accounts.
The reporting on how the Ferguson police were fleecing their black citizens, likely violating their constitutional rights, in order to finance the city’s budget came out only after the Michael Brown shooting brought scrutiny. In addition, the reporting was largely based on the investigations of a local legal aid group and the U.S. Department of Justice (wapo.st/1EnC4Oh). One has to wonder, with the police track record of racial profiling in that area, why no local reporters had done this story long ago.
Part of the problem is that, though we’d prefer not to believe it, journalists hold the same racial anxieties, blind spots and assumptions as our society at large.
It’s clear we want to do better. But how?
Well, for one, stop obsessing over intent. It seems that we become preoccupied with determining and proving intent when it comes to investigating racial inequality in a way we do not when it comes to other reporting.
Let’s say there is an oil spill on the Gulf Coast. A good investigative reporter would never be content to simply report on how it happened, how many gallons were spilled and the environmental ramifications of the spill. We’d want to know what caused the spill, who was responsible, whether it was part of a pattern, if it could have been avoided, and if so, why it wasn’t prevented. We would not worry about whether the head of the oil company was a climate change denier or hated ducks. If we got that information, it would be a great bonus. But the important things in this case were the action, the harm and whether the spill could have been avoided.
It’s no different when investigating racial inequity. When I wrote about the intentional resegregation of the Tuscaloosa City Schools in “Segregation Now” (bit.ly/1MTiJ9h), I did not have to show that school officials did not like black kids or wanted to hurt black kids. I only had to show that they made a decision to split apart the city’s integrated high school into three separate ones and then drew the attendance lines in a way that would have predictably created an all-black high school.
One of the ways I did this was to request the district’s attendance zone maps and then overlay that over a map with census data on racial makeup of neighborhoods. This showed that attendance zones were heavily gerrymandered in order to produce certain racial makeups within schools. I then used school district data to show that promises made — promises about how the students at the all-black school would be provided the same quality of teachers, courses and extracurricular activities — had been broken.
Here, the “why” was interesting, and I reported both school officials’ reasoning and what was likely the real reason for resegregation. But that was not the most important thing, and it certainly did nothing to weaken the investigation. All that really mattered was the action and the harm.
That leads to my next tip: There are almost never smoking guns, so don’t decide whether to go forward based on the ability to find one. Blatant discrimination has been rare since racial discrimination was barred in most aspects of American life in the 1960s. You will almost never find an email that lays out the racist reasoning behind a policing or housing policy. There might not even be a racist reasoning. Often public officials put toxic waste sites or public housing in black and Latinos neighborhoods not because they particularly dislike black Americans and Latinos, but because they face less political resistance than in wealthier white communities.
What’s important to determine is whether the person in the position of authority would have been able to understand that said action, policy or inaction would disproportionately harm people of color. If so, why did the person or authoritative body make that decision?
The Tampa Bay Times offers a case study in how this is done in a stunning investigation published in August called “Failure Factories” (bit.ly/1UipQZl). In this exhaustively reported yearlong project, the Times documented how the Pinellas County School Board knowingly created five failing black schools after a judge released the district from its segregation order. What makes this report stand out is not just that it documented school resegregation — these stories are a dime a dozen — but that it took every claim school officials made about why the resegregation happened and why the schools were failing, and then actually investigated them, allowing the Times to knock each one of the excuses down. This reporting allowed the journalists to write about the injustice done to these children in stark language rarely seen in race reporting.
Third, if you want to do powerful investigations into racial inequality, you need to become an expert in the laws and policies that deal with civil rights. You should also look into research and scholarship done in the particular area of inequality you plan on investigating. A reporter would never presume to be an expert on schools just because he or she attended one. And we should never presume to understand how race works because we belong to one.
In writing about school segregation, reporters should understand the case law governing what districts can and cannot do. They should understand the workings and purview of the agencies enforcing civil rights, such as the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education.
It seems that we become preoccupied with determining and proving intent when it comes to investigating racial inequality in a way we do not when it comes to other reporting.
When I first started writing about housing segregation, I was shocked to learn that the 1968 Fair Housing Act did not just ban discrimination — it required governments to affirmatively act to break down housing segregation. This led to a yearlong investigation that exposed how the federal government had failed for four decades to enforce the landmark Fair Housing Act (bit.ly/1NMp0nP). I documented this in part by showing that the federal government had only withheld funding from one community in 40 years for violating the law, even when judges had found cities guilty of discriminating.
Reporters should read relevant laws, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the Equal Employment Opportunities Act, the same way they would read the No Child Left Behind Act if investigating whether districts were complying with that law. Check in with the enforcement agencies at your local, state and federal governments. It’s a good way to find stories of people and institutions violating civil rights laws, but also to discover which agencies aren’t doing their jobs.
In August, The Center for Public Integrity published an astounding series of investigations called “Environmental Justice, Denied” (bit.ly/1hlQUub). The series showed how the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights had not made a single formal finding of discrimination in 22 years, despite hundreds of exhaustively documented complaints from black and Latino communities. Before this investigation ran, I think it would be safe to assume most of us did not even know the EPA had its own civil rights office. But many federal agencies do, including the Department of Transportation and the U.S. Treasury.
And the last tip is probably the most obvious, but one that simply does not happen enough. Go out into the communities, spend time on the corners, in the restaurants, in the schools, in the homes of the segregated black and brown neighborhoods in your coverage areas. Get to know the people there, and the stories will come. You’ll also learn not to so easily dismiss stories of race that might seem fantastical to an outsider.
When a police shooting or another police incident happens in your community, treat the police account with the same skepticism you do the civilian account. Investigate both sides. Talk to witnesses. This seems like a common sense, but we all know this is not how it typically goes. In case after case, the media has reported verbatim the police account of an incident, only to have the truth revealed by video.
A year before the national media converged on Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray and ensuing riot, The Baltimore Sun published a critical investigation into police brutality there (bsun.md/1fLoecR). The story was about violent, unaccountable policing, but it was also a story about the people in the city who had the least clout — citizens who were both black and poor.
This story was not reactive, as stories about racial inequality often are. It also gave The Sun credibility in a marginalized community. Instead of suddenly “discovering” the plight of these poor black communities in an attempt to figure out what happened after the riot, as is often the case, The Sun story gave this community voice and provided the context about why the city exploded long before it did.
But also, as is the case with all the stories referenced, The Sun piece was a quintessential investigative project. Period. We must shift our thinking that writing and reporting about race is somehow second-class or marginal, that these stories are not of the same stature or importance as investigations into campaigns, the military and statehouse politics. When done right, when pursued with the same vigor, curiosity, doggedness, skepticism and passion as other investigations, investigations into racial inequality rival the best of our work — and more importantly, they can change lives.
Now, get to work.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice. Prior to joining The Times, Hannah-Jones spent the last few years at the non-profit investigative reporting organization, ProPublica, where she investigated the way segregation in housing and schools is created and maintained through official action. Her 2014 investigation into school resegregation won two Online News Association awards, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting and was a National Magazine Award finalist.
By Nikole Hannah-Jones | New York Times Magazine
The last year has been a particularly tumultuous one when it comes to race in the United States. We’ve seen riots in two cities following the police killings of unarmed black men. There have been nationwide protests in response to the dozens of black Americans who have died either at the hands of police or in police custody. And the Republican primary has whipped up old fears of Latino immigrants as a criminal scourge.
Reporters have been there, covering the news as it happens. But reporters have also been grappling with how to tell the deeper stories behind the flare-ups, how to do real accountability reporting about racial inequality. The desire has been evident to me as I have sat on panels discussing this very thing at several journalism conferences over the last year, and each time I have been greeted by a standing-room-only crowd.
Journalists know there are important stories to be dug up, but they struggle to do so in a meaningful way.
Investigating racial inequality is particularly tricky for journalists. It’s not something many of us have been groomed to do in our newsrooms. Until recently, people thought it pretty radical that I described my beat as investigating the ways racial inequality is created and maintained through official action and policy. Race coverage has often been marginalized in newsrooms, and it’s certainly rare to have an investigative beat built around it.
Newsrooms, and the journalists in them, have often reflected the societal view that present-day racial disparities largely result from the unforeseeable impacts of nondiscriminatory policies, past discrimination, or, in blatant cases, a few bad apples. For instance, I commonly read in a news report some throwaway sentence or another about housing segregation in a city resulting from a “legacy of discrimination.”
This is, of course, partially true, but what is also true is that the federal government and housing enforcement agencies across the country continue to find rampant discrimination among landlords, real estate agents and lenders. What’s also true is that zoning and other land-use policies passed by real people in real communities lead to segregation, as well, and that this is rarely an accident.
Part of the problem is that, though we’d prefer not to believe it, journalists hold the same racial anxieties, blind spots and assumptions as our society at large. No one wants to be called racist, so we are reticent to call out in others actions and decisions that may be influenced by race.
When white journalists grow up in largely white communities with functioning schools, responsive government, well-maintained infrastructure and a police force that treats them with respect, it makes sense that even the most skeptical among them could take it for granted that this is how America is for others, too.
Black Americans have been complaining about police brutality in their communities for years, but much of the coverage from predominantly white newsrooms favored the accounts of the very police who were being accused. It is no accident that the media’s scrutiny of policing over the last year was, at least initially, driven by civilians’ cell phone video footage that directly contradicted police accounts.
The reporting on how the Ferguson police were fleecing their black citizens, likely violating their constitutional rights, in order to finance the city’s budget came out only after the Michael Brown shooting brought scrutiny. In addition, the reporting was largely based on the investigations of a local legal aid group and the U.S. Department of Justice (wapo.st/1EnC4Oh). One has to wonder, with the police track record of racial profiling in that area, why no local reporters had done this story long ago.
Part of the problem is that, though we’d prefer not to believe it, journalists hold the same racial anxieties, blind spots and assumptions as our society at large.
It’s clear we want to do better. But how?
Well, for one, stop obsessing over intent. It seems that we become preoccupied with determining and proving intent when it comes to investigating racial inequality in a way we do not when it comes to other reporting.
Let’s say there is an oil spill on the Gulf Coast. A good investigative reporter would never be content to simply report on how it happened, how many gallons were spilled and the environmental ramifications of the spill. We’d want to know what caused the spill, who was responsible, whether it was part of a pattern, if it could have been avoided, and if so, why it wasn’t prevented. We would not worry about whether the head of the oil company was a climate change denier or hated ducks. If we got that information, it would be a great bonus. But the important things in this case were the action, the harm and whether the spill could have been avoided.
It’s no different when investigating racial inequity. When I wrote about the intentional resegregation of the Tuscaloosa City Schools in “Segregation Now” (bit.ly/1MTiJ9h), I did not have to show that school officials did not like black kids or wanted to hurt black kids. I only had to show that they made a decision to split apart the city’s integrated high school into three separate ones and then drew the attendance lines in a way that would have predictably created an all-black high school.
One of the ways I did this was to request the district’s attendance zone maps and then overlay that over a map with census data on racial makeup of neighborhoods. This showed that attendance zones were heavily gerrymandered in order to produce certain racial makeups within schools. I then used school district data to show that promises made — promises about how the students at the all-black school would be provided the same quality of teachers, courses and extracurricular activities — had been broken.
Here, the “why” was interesting, and I reported both school officials’ reasoning and what was likely the real reason for resegregation. But that was not the most important thing, and it certainly did nothing to weaken the investigation. All that really mattered was the action and the harm.
That leads to my next tip: There are almost never smoking guns, so don’t decide whether to go forward based on the ability to find one. Blatant discrimination has been rare since racial discrimination was barred in most aspects of American life in the 1960s. You will almost never find an email that lays out the racist reasoning behind a policing or housing policy. There might not even be a racist reasoning. Often public officials put toxic waste sites or public housing in black and Latinos neighborhoods not because they particularly dislike black Americans and Latinos, but because they face less political resistance than in wealthier white communities.
What’s important to determine is whether the person in the position of authority would have been able to understand that said action, policy or inaction would disproportionately harm people of color. If so, why did the person or authoritative body make that decision?
The Tampa Bay Times offers a case study in how this is done in a stunning investigation published in August called “Failure Factories” (bit.ly/1UipQZl). In this exhaustively reported yearlong project, the Times documented how the Pinellas County School Board knowingly created five failing black schools after a judge released the district from its segregation order. What makes this report stand out is not just that it documented school resegregation — these stories are a dime a dozen — but that it took every claim school officials made about why the resegregation happened and why the schools were failing, and then actually investigated them, allowing the Times to knock each one of the excuses down. This reporting allowed the journalists to write about the injustice done to these children in stark language rarely seen in race reporting.
Third, if you want to do powerful investigations into racial inequality, you need to become an expert in the laws and policies that deal with civil rights. You should also look into research and scholarship done in the particular area of inequality you plan on investigating. A reporter would never presume to be an expert on schools just because he or she attended one. And we should never presume to understand how race works because we belong to one.
In writing about school segregation, reporters should understand the case law governing what districts can and cannot do. They should understand the workings and purview of the agencies enforcing civil rights, such as the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education.
It seems that we become preoccupied with determining and proving intent when it comes to investigating racial inequality in a way we do not when it comes to other reporting.
When I first started writing about housing segregation, I was shocked to learn that the 1968 Fair Housing Act did not just ban discrimination — it required governments to affirmatively act to break down housing segregation. This led to a yearlong investigation that exposed how the federal government had failed for four decades to enforce the landmark Fair Housing Act (bit.ly/1NMp0nP). I documented this in part by showing that the federal government had only withheld funding from one community in 40 years for violating the law, even when judges had found cities guilty of discriminating.
Reporters should read relevant laws, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the Equal Employment Opportunities Act, the same way they would read the No Child Left Behind Act if investigating whether districts were complying with that law. Check in with the enforcement agencies at your local, state and federal governments. It’s a good way to find stories of people and institutions violating civil rights laws, but also to discover which agencies aren’t doing their jobs.
In August, The Center for Public Integrity published an astounding series of investigations called “Environmental Justice, Denied” (bit.ly/1hlQUub). The series showed how the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights had not made a single formal finding of discrimination in 22 years, despite hundreds of exhaustively documented complaints from black and Latino communities. Before this investigation ran, I think it would be safe to assume most of us did not even know the EPA had its own civil rights office. But many federal agencies do, including the Department of Transportation and the U.S. Treasury.
And the last tip is probably the most obvious, but one that simply does not happen enough. Go out into the communities, spend time on the corners, in the restaurants, in the schools, in the homes of the segregated black and brown neighborhoods in your coverage areas. Get to know the people there, and the stories will come. You’ll also learn not to so easily dismiss stories of race that might seem fantastical to an outsider.
When a police shooting or another police incident happens in your community, treat the police account with the same skepticism you do the civilian account. Investigate both sides. Talk to witnesses. This seems like a common sense, but we all know this is not how it typically goes. In case after case, the media has reported verbatim the police account of an incident, only to have the truth revealed by video.
A year before the national media converged on Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray and ensuing riot, The Baltimore Sun published a critical investigation into police brutality there (bsun.md/1fLoecR). The story was about violent, unaccountable policing, but it was also a story about the people in the city who had the least clout — citizens who were both black and poor.
This story was not reactive, as stories about racial inequality often are. It also gave The Sun credibility in a marginalized community. Instead of suddenly “discovering” the plight of these poor black communities in an attempt to figure out what happened after the riot, as is often the case, The Sun story gave this community voice and provided the context about why the city exploded long before it did.
But also, as is the case with all the stories referenced, The Sun piece was a quintessential investigative project. Period. We must shift our thinking that writing and reporting about race is somehow second-class or marginal, that these stories are not of the same stature or importance as investigations into campaigns, the military and statehouse politics. When done right, when pursued with the same vigor, curiosity, doggedness, skepticism and passion as other investigations, investigations into racial inequality rival the best of our work — and more importantly, they can change lives.
Now, get to work.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice. Prior to joining The Times, Hannah-Jones spent the last few years at the non-profit investigative reporting organization, ProPublica, where she investigated the way segregation in housing and schools is created and maintained through official action. Her 2014 investigation into school resegregation won two Online News Association awards, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting and was a National Magazine Award finalist.
There were elusive aspects to this story that dogged Chris Ingalls from the beginning — the inscrutable website, the murky legal environment, the incognito maternity mansion. But none was more important, or more delicate, than scoring the face-to-face interviews that unravelled everything.
It began two years ago. A Chinese viewer had written to Seattle’s KING 5 TV, where Ingalls works on the investigations team, asking if the station was aware of a business that flew pregnant women into the country to give birth. The anonymous tipster included a link to the business’ website, written entirely in Mandarin.
For parents who want their children born on American soil — which automatically grants the baby U.S. citizenship — the website offered to help arrange a travel visa for the mother. Once in Seattle, she would spend about three months in an expansive house near a golf course until she gave birth.
Why, Ingalls wondered, was this shady-sounding business in such an upscale area? Was this somehow legal? And who else knew about it?
For a year and a half, the story went nowhere. Nobody at the station spoke Mandarin, so Ingalls showed the site to someone who did; the two of them still couldn’t find anything worth reporting. The golf course on the website looked familiar, but Ingalls couldn’t track down the house.
He was ready to give up when a third tip came in. It wasn’t much different than the others — Have you guys seen this website? Isn’t this illegal? — but Ingalls pulled up the website again anyway. He clicked “translate” on Google Chrome and found something new: the website had been updated. There were more pictures, and a company name, Seattle Fu Hua Enterprises LLC, now appeared at the bottom of the page. Ingalls pulled the company’s corporate registration with Washington state. He found the names of the owner and some employees, along with phone numbers and email addresses. He tried them all.
To his surprise, one of the employees called him back. She spoke English, and she agreed to meet him at a coffee shop. Ingalls hightailed it there in less than a half hour. He came alone, but she was still uneasy. Halfway through the interview, she asked if he was secretly recording her.
“There was a lot of reticence there, no question about it,” Ingalls said. “But that was the door opening for me, right?”
He wasn’t able to persuade that first source to tell her story on camera, but she did agree to help him. She and others had left Fu Hua Enterprises after a falling out with the owner, and she agreed to vouch for Ingalls to the other disgruntled employees.
"In the fast-paced world that we’re in, we try to tie up the interview on the phone, we try to rope them in on the phone, and that wouldn’t have worked in this case"
- Chris Ingalls
That was crucial, Ingalls said, for getting him access to a community in which he was very much an outsider. And making his pitch to the ex-employees in person — or, even better, having a trusted member of the community make the pitch for him — worked so much better than trying to introduce himself over voicemail, he said.
“In the fast-paced world that we’re in, we try to tie up the interview on the phone, we try to rope them in on the phone, and that wouldn’t have worked in this case,” he said.
By meeting with sources in an environment where they felt at ease, “they can see you and talk to you and see that you’re a regular person,” he said.
Together, Ingalls and his initial source convinced the former house manager for Fu Hua to sit down for an interview on camera. Ingalls would give the man a pseudonym, Jung, and his face would be hidden in shadows.
It was the first time they met, Ingalls said, and “the interview did not start off well.”
Jung and the first source didn’t think they had done anything wrong, and they worried how Ingalls’ story would portray them.
“That was a big hurdle to overcome — ‘Are you going to blame me?’ — that’s what they wanted to know,” Ingalls said. “And my answer was truthful, which is important: I don’t know if this is against the law or not, but I want you to tell me what you were doing, what your role was and what you saw. And if you tell me you didn’t believe you were breaking the law, I will put that on TV and will say that.”
Essentially, Jung wanted a chance to tell their side of the story, Ingalls said. “So that was sort of the way that I encouraged him: You have nothing to hide, so tell me what you know about how this process was working.” And because they were speaking from different cultural perspectives, Ingalls tried to conduct the interview gently.
“What you do to make people feel comfortable with you, to show them you’re not trying to shame them or single them out (as) something that’s an oddity — that part you need to be very, very careful about,” he said. “It’s trying to have that personal connection so that person is willing to tell you their story.”
Jung was worried his English wasn’t good enough for television, and initially he was very guarded. But having his friend, Ingalls’ first source, in the room during the interview helped a lot, Ingalls said. “His friend had told him, ‘You need to paint an accurate picture of what was happening here.’ And that sort of loosened him up a little bit.”
Over their 45-minute interview, Ingalls was able to piece together how Fu Hua Enterprises operated: The owner coached the mothers to conceal their pregnancies and to lie to immigration officials about why they came to Seattle. The mothers would give birth, pay for their medical treatment in cash, and leave. Between one and four women at a time would stay in the house near the golf course, paying about $45,000.
(After his story aired, Ingalls was contacted by a woman in China who had used Fu Hua Enterprises. She confirmed Ingalls’ reporting and added more details, like the dodgy real estate investments connected with the company’s owner, which Ingalls reported in a follow-up story.)
So Ingalls had his material, but how to frame it?
“I didn’t want this to be a slam on any immigrant that wants to come to this country,” he said. In the online text that accompanied his broadcast, he referenced Jeb Bush’s “anchor babies” comments, but overall he tried to avoid politics.
“The moment your story indicates ‘immigration: good’ or ‘immigration: bad,’ or Republican this or Democrat that, you lose a certain part of your audience, because they think they know what this is all about,” he said.
Instead, he tried to focus on whether Fu Hua Enterprises was breaking the law.
“I mean, I don’t care what community they’re from. If they’re violating the law, they’re violating the law,” he said. “I always feel like your default there is, well is this legal or is it illegal?”
That wasn’t such an easy question to answer. Ingalls, who has covered the federal justice system, soon realized birth tourism existed in a legal grey area. His sources told him contradictory things, pointed to different agencies’ divergent policies, and they finally admitted to him, “Hey, we’re kinda confused too,” Ingalls said.
But lying to immigration officials about their reasons for coming to the U.S. — as the women using Fu Hua Enterprises had been coached to do, according to Ingalls’ sources — was clearly illegal.
“That, to me, was all that I needed to know for us to make the story go the way it did,” he said. “That made me comfortable right there.”
Adam Aton is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism and a student employee at IRE. You can follow him on Twitter here or email him at adama@ire.org.
Meet Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. You might have guessed from their names that they’re brothers. They’re also both investigative journalists working for ESPN. On this episode, we’re sharing pieces of our conversations with the brothers during their recent trip to the University of Missouri. We talk about everything from their reporting on the NFL’s concussion crisis to the much-discussed relationship between ESPN and the NFL, and how they decide when to team up on a reporting project.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
Shawn Shinneman produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
Music in this episode is by Podington Bear.
Due to a booking conflict by the New Orleans Marriott, the IRE conference will be held a week earlier. Please mark your calendars for June 16-19, 2016 and plan to attend the annual conference being held in New Orleans.
The best in the business will gather for more than 150 panels, hands-on classes and special presentations about covering business, public safety, government, health care, education, the military, the environment and other key beats. Speakers will share strategies for locating documents and gaining access to public records, finding the best stories and managing investigations. Join the discussion about how to practice investigative journalism in print, broadcast, Web and alternative newsroom models. The conference begins Thursday morning at 9 a.m. and runs all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday, sessions will end by 12:30 p.m. on Sunday.
For any questions on the new date or the conference, please contact Executive Director Mark Horvit at 573-882-1984.
If you're a journalist in the Chicago area, we hope you’ll join us for a Meetup on Thursday, Nov. 19. We’ll be gathering at Blue Frog 22 starting at 6 pm. Come share tips with future investigative reporters.
Our guest this month is Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, a freelance reporter and member of the Social Justice News Nexus team at Northwestern University. Adriana will tell us about the story behind the story for her remarkable investigation that exposed how Puerto Rico exports its drug addicts to Chicago.
As always, this event is open to members and non-members (this includes students and freelancers).
Please RSVP on the Meetup page and, if you haven’t done so already, join the group.
IRE has member-organized Meetup groups in six cities. Learn more about them on our IRE Meetups page.
How do you get the truth out of a liar? On this bonus episode, experts weigh in on just that. You’ll hear from investigative reporter Matt Apuzzo, former CIA polygraph examiner Barry McManus, and former FBI counterterrorism agent Don Borelli. In this audio pulled from the 2015 IRE Conference, the three discuss how to develop rapport, when to get confrontational and how to spot kernels of truth hidden in all those lies.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Adam Aton produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
Music in this episode is by Podington Bear.
By Shada Hottam | Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
The idea of investigating “Nightmare Dorm at Sana’a University” started after I enrolled at Sana’a University to study TV and radio journalism in 2010. Over the years, I came to hear from my female colleagues about the horrible conditions they lived in at the dormitory, the only female residence in Yemen attached to a state-run university.
Women had to survive a poorly maintained, dirty and overcrowded facility that housed about 500 female students, more than double its capacity. They had to put up with indifferent and harsh supervisors.
I got furious one day when I found out there were 15 female students with no option other than sleeping inside the mosque, near the dormitory, without any access to running water, electricity, kitchen utensils, bathrooms, showers and beds. They did not even have proper windows to keep out cats and insects.
I felt that there were many secrets that no one wanted to expose for fear of reprisal from society, family and the university administration. The girls were worried that if they complained, the administration would take action against them or their families would force them to come back home, thus stripping them of a chance to continue their undergraduate studies. In Yemen’s male-dominated, conservative society, traditions and lack of money often prevent girls from renting out flats to live on their own.
The only option they had was to shut up, accept the situation and survive. Otherwise, they would be part of Yemen’s female illiterate, which is more than 50 percent of the female population.
I had to win their trust to tell their untold stories and to be the voice of the powerless. I assured them that I would try to document their daily miseries in a run-down dorm for the sake of transparency, good governance and to force those responsible to act and remedy the situation.
In meetings with students living in the dorm, I assured them that my ultimate goal was to ease the injustice and not to defame anyone or cause a sensational scandal. In the beginning, they were apprehensive, and that wasn’t surprising, as many ordinary Yemenis do not trust media independence and professionalism. I also promised to protect their identities by giving them other names to safeguard their privacy and shield them from trouble. It is very important that victims are assured that you understand their plight and can show empathy. Most of the work of investigative reporters in Yemen depends on secret sources. But that does not mean we give them a free ride and don’t double-check the accuracy of what they tell us.
It also took a while until they were able to break their silence and tell me why they had accepted to live in such dismal conditions inside the dorm.
“We have no other option but to shut up, or stop our university education, go back to our families living outside Sana’a and waste our lives and futures,” one person said. “The mentality of my family goes back to the stone ages.”
To gain access, I only had to borrow the dorm ID of a female colleague to prove that I lived there. Guards manning the gate are actually too busy and too distracted to check the IDs of women entering the dorm. Even a man can wear a traditional long robe, cover his face and enter the facility without risk of being caught by these guards.
I was a senior at the university when I started the project and finished it after graduation. I did not live in the dorms.
To understand how the system at the dorm worked, I had to start at the bottom of things and move up. I had to educate myself about the requirements and conditions for a woman to be accepted into the dorm, as well as who was responsible for admission decisions; which laws and regulations governed the dorm; who implemented them; and who supervised their implementation.
I had to get hold of the university’s budget for the past 10 years, as dispensed by the state, to see how much money was allocated for annual maintenance on the dorm facilities and how much money had been spent. I had to talk to past and present wardens of the dorm to see what went wrong and how things reached that terrible end.
Then I had to confront the culprits, starting with the president, a very powerful figure. Every time he tried to evade my question or to accuse me of exaggeration, I would pull out fact after fact as documented over months of hard work. Then editors at the Amman-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) went over several drafts of my story and offered guidance by asking for more information and verifying data. Then ARIJ contracted a Yemeni lawyer to review the final text before it was published. This is part of ARIJ’s stringent bulletproofing of the investigative and editorial process.
Once I ran the investigation, many of the dorm residents thanked me for completing a balanced and honest investigation that would hopefully lead to a lot of soul searching and solutions. Human rights activists, other journalists, politicians and local dignitaries also thanked me for the hard work, a rarity in local media. Of course, the university’s officials did not like it, but they could not deny any word. Facts and documentation were my weapon against their attempts to discredit my report.
Some might say, “Look at that — a female journalist is investigating a female dorm.” But that wouldn’t take away from all the hard effort, investigating and documenting that was put in by a professional journalist, who, regardless of her sex, was doing a job like any doctor, nurse or lawyer in the service of the public. In addition, being a woman gave me wide-open access into an area that can only be accessed by women.
Another reason that prodded me to investigate the situation at the dorm is because my society suffers a huge gap in gender equality in stark contrast to the 1950s, when women had a role to play in society and the Queen of Sheba ruled. Also, most of the journalists are men who are working on stories involving power, politics and corruption.
I wanted to investigate something as simple as the lives of female students at the dorm — a story that shows how the system does not function properly even at the most basic level. If a matter as simple as setting up a working dormitory does not work, then what could that mean for more important issues that affect the wider population?
Such a story also had easy access to sources in a country where investigations can be difficult. Although Yemen has had a freedom of information law since 2012, it remains mere ink on paper. Most ministries have not classified their documents or set up departments where one can file a request.
Journalists, I believe, are there to serve the public, to expose what is wrong and to hold officials accountable to what they promise and what they deliver.
It is our duty as journalists to use our conscience, ethics, profession and pen to be society’s watchdogs instead of being officials’ lapdogs. To use your pen is not a crime, but to remain silent about abuses hurting the public is the crime. Of course, being a female journalist is in itself a daily battle in a profession that is a closed-male club. Yemen society in general believes that women should stay at home and be homemakers, serving their husbands and kids. Men will respect female reporters due to tradition and not try to harass them, but at the same time, they will look down upon them as inferior.
Despite the fact that society is very conservative — socially and religiously — being a woman in journalism can have its advantages. With growing political and media polarization in Yemen, male sources look at female journalists as being less politicized than male journalists, and this helps.
Reducing the gender gap in my society will take time. It’s true that Yemeni women played a role in standing up against oppression, indignity and human rights abuses at the start of the 2011 revolution that swept across Yemen and ended in the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It’s also true that many officials and political leaders that took over during the transition period wanted to reflect a reformist attitude by starting to involve more women in decision-making and in Yemen’s political life.
Whatever minimal gains women have achieved since 2011 have sadly been rolled back under the Saudi-led war on Yemen, raging for months with no sign of hope on the horizon.
In such a tragic situation, journalists should be honest voices, as they are the privileged ones to write the first draft of history and to document what went right and what went wrong for the benefit of the public and civilization. Being a female journalist has been tough in normal times. Today, it is an impossible mission in a country witnessing daily bombings, a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, chronic fuel and electricity shortages, no functioning government and a politically polarized media that has become a key player in the war.
I plan to continue reporting. It is a profession I have chosen out of principle and value. It is my job to focus on what goes on in my society (whether right or wrong), to serve the public by allowing them to make up their minds with facts and to demand for their rights. It is also our job as members of what should be an independent Fourth Estate to monitor those in power, hold them accountable and make sure they are implementing what they have promised us.
Shada Hottam holds a bachelor’s degree in TV and radio journalism from Sana’a University. She presented the youth radio program “Share Shabab with Shada Hottam” until the Houthi rebels took over the private-run radio station in October. Her first investigation, “Nightmare Dorm at Sana’a University,” was assisted with technical, professional and financial support from ARIJ, the region’s leading media-support organization that has promoted “accountability journalism” in nine Arab states since 2005.
The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database has just been updated in the NICAR Data Library. Loan application records for 2014 are now available.
HMDA requires all banks, savings and loans, savings banks and credit unions with assets of more than $33 million and offices in metropolitan areas to report mortgage applications.
WHAT CAN I DO WITH IT?
You can analyze lending practices in your area, including variations between different races and ethnicities. Reporters have used this data to show that black applicants were four times as likely as whites to get high interest rates, even when they had substantially higher incomes.
You can look at trends in foreclosures on homes that had harsh terms on loans. Reporters have also used HMDA data and foreclosure reports to explain how unstable mortgage loans were causing uninformed borrowers to lose their homes.
Check out these tipsheets for further advice how to use HMDA data:
WHAT'S IN IT?
Each loan record contains demographic information about loan applicants, including:
Check out the documentation -- Readme.txt -- and a sample of the data -- HMDA.xls.
WHAT FORMAT?
The most recent year of HMDA data comes in .CSV format, easily imported into database managers; the files are too big for Excel. If you'd like something different, contact us and we'll do our best to help you out. Email datalib@ire.org or call (573) 884-7711.
Older data from 1992 - 2013 is also available for purchase; contact the data library. State slices are also available.
To purchase and download the full data online, visit the online store at https://www.ire.org/nicar/database-library/databases/hmda/. You can also contact the library directly by emailing datalib@ire.org or calling (573) 884-7711.
Contact us if you have any questions about the data, or to tell us how you've used HMDA in your reporting.
The CIA’s former chief polygrapher, an ex-FBI counterterrorism expert and a Pulitzer-winning reporter walk into a bar.
Ok, that’s not true. But the three did come together for a panel at IRE’s 2015 conference in Philadelphia called "Interviewing Liars."
Matt Apuzzo, a New York Times reporter who was on the Associated Press team that revealed how the NYPD spied on muslim communities, moderated the panel. He was joined by Don Borelli, who was the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Dr. Barry McManus, who worked as a CIA polygraph examiner for more than 20 years.
The three of them talked about how to get sources to open up, the upsides and downsides of getting confrontational, and what it takes to bluff a liar.
Creating doubt
McManus starts by describing what liars need to do during an interview: create doubt. With that in mind, Borelli cautions against treating an interview as your primary reporting tool. A confrontational interview might be the centerpiece of an article or broadcast, he says, but often it’s all the work before and after an interview that gives an investigation its potency.
Building rapport
Apuzzo knows reporters can make people uneasy. So how do you move past that? Borelli prefers to start with props, like photos, because it makes the source feel like they’re helping you. McManus says the more you know about a source, the easier it should be to find some shared interest or experience that can power the conversation, at least in the beginning.
Venue matters. But how much?
It’s foolish to think people will dish about their workplace when they’re still at the office, Apuzzo says. But, Borelli points out, knocking on someone’s door also has its drawbacks. McManus says that, realistically, you need to be ready to interview anywhere.
Challenge the lies
Sometimes you’ve just got to get aggressive — but recognizing when that will work isn’t so clear cut. Your facts are your leverage, and Borelli describes how he uses them to confront people. McManus cautions against making the person feel cornered.
...or keep your powder dry
Lies give you information too, McManus says. What motivates someone to lie? Who do they lie to? How do their lies evolve? All of that can give you insight into a person. The important thing, McManus says, is to keep them talking.
Repeat questions
If you can catch a person changing their answers, you can use that opening as leverage to get the rest of the story. It doesn’t need to be confrontational, Borelli says, especially if the two of you have built up a good rapport.
Bluff carefully
Presumptive questions are a great tool, McManus says, as long as you’re basing them off facts. If the source recognizes you’re fishing for information, you’ve probably lost whatever leverage or trust you had with them.
Members can download the entire hour-long panel and McManus’ tipsheet here.
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