Written by Phil Chamberlain, Deputy Director in the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath
In post-war South Africa, investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo came out of the army and began working for the magazine Drum.
He published a series of important exposes. In one he contrived to have himself arrested so that he could report on conditions inside Johannesburg’s notorious central prison. In another he revealed the dreadful labour conditions on farms.
In 1957, while investigating an illegal abortion racket, he was stabbed to death on his way to meet a source. His murder remains unsolved.
At this years’ African Investigative Journalism Conference each room it uses on the Wit University campus has been named after a pioneering South African reporter. A picture of them adorns each space.
For the 400 people attending it is reminder of the great heritage of reporting which the Johannesburg conference can draw upon. (If you would like to dive deeper into that heritage try African Muckrackers: 75 years of Investigative Journalism from Africa edited by Anya Shiffrin and George Lugadambi).
And it is also a reminder of the continued threats under which investigative journalism operates.
One of the themes through this 20th conference, has been recognising and combatting efforts to surveil, intimidate and cower researchers and reporters.
In session after session people raised examples. The mining investigations where reporters fear for their physical safety, the agriculture investigations revealing industry surveillance and the digital threats from governments keen to hide human rights abuses.
One approach has been to document such attacks.
The Media Attack Reporting System (MARS) is a project from Media Monitoring Africa.
It was developed in response to the increase in online attacks against journalists and to combat the limited action taken by both government and technology platforms.
It describes it missions as: “By providing journalists, and those who support them, with an independent tool for reporting attacks, MARS is contributing to building a public record and archive of attacks. An archive that can be used as evidence for action.”
Journalists who are being attacked can access this common, anonymised, archive of attacks and can also store their own attacks in their personal archive.
“The goal is to reveal and highlight the scale of attacks and to show that not only are journalists not alone, but to show the world a visual reminder of the high cost of journalism,” says MARS.
On 1 November, the UK's National Union of Journalists launched a safety tracker to capture incidents of harassment and abuse. Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ's general secretary, said: “The NUJ wants journalists to engage with the tracker, and to help us build up a clear picture of the scale of the intimidation, threats and violence they are facing simply for doing their jobs." Meanwhile the MARS project is looking to expand to cover human rights defenders in future versions."
Of course we know that public health officials, tobacco control advocates and researchers are also not immune to attacks from industry. Research from TCRG has detailed the range and impact of such attacks, particularly in low and middle-income countries. Further analysis of this in relation to researchers in areas such as food and alcohol is due out in November.
Dr Sharon Nyatsanza, Deputy Director of the National Council Against Smoking in South Africa, told the conference about the industry response to the tobacco control bill currently going through parliament.
“They have been very active in trying to delay the law,” she said. “But they do not show themselves directly, they use front groups.”
There have been noisy protests against the bill with demonstrators bussed in and tobacco industry personnel spotted keeping a low profile nearby. Tobacco control advocates report feeling intimidated by these protests.
Such intimidation documented globally by TCRG research also includes legal threats, complaints to regulators about tobacco control activities, using Freedom of Information requests to tie up organisations in paperwork and attacking people online.
The plans, discussions and documents journalists and researchers build up are of intense interest to bad actors. Therefore building in some digital safeguards to ward off such threats is crucial.
However, as Jones Baraza, digital security manager at Code for Africa, said: “Many newsrooms fail to provide user awareness training or capacity building to help identify social engineering attacks.”
In parallel with the AIJC conference, the Tobacco Control Research Group has been working with Blueprint for Free Speech, an NGO supporting the right to freedom of expression. Together they have running training days in several African countries for journalists and those working in tobacco control to protect themselves from digital threats.
The aim is to give a people a baseline level of protection for their devices and get them thinking about how to make their communications secure. Blueprint break it down to protection in three areas: tracking, tricking and hacking.
At a packed session at the conference there were plenty of questions from delegates and clearly a desire for more information. Further such training is planned as we look to build that capacity to operate safely in pursuit of improving public health.
