‘Inconvenient DNA’ Image: author’s own.
This essay explores the premise that:
‘the purpose of investigative journalism is to hold powerful interests to account and highlight systemic corruption or breakdown’.
I review two works to support this statement: Sarah Koenig’s ‘Serial’ podcasts, an investigation into the murder of teenager, Hae Min Lee and subsequent conviction of Adnan Syed; and Greg Palast’s ‘How to Steal the Presidency and Get Away with It’, which investigates significant corruption during the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaign, when 57,700 of Florida’s citizens were wrongfully denied voting entitlement.
When investigations into corruption and breakdown are denied to journalists, democratic process is lost. As John Pilger states, ‘Without it, our sense of injustice would lose its vocabulary and people would not be armed with the information they need to fight it’ (Pilger, 2005, p. xvi). In The Rebirth of News: The Internet is killing newspapers and giving birth to a new sort of news business (The Economist, 14 May, 2009) the press is described as the fourth estate, a ‘pillar of the polity’ with news as the ‘conscience of nations’ that crucially maintains democracy. Failing to engage in investigative or ‘accountability’ journalism can spell catastrophe for an uninformed public. Starkman (2014) uses the lead up to the 2008 global financial crisis as an example, when the media fixated on ‘access’ journalism for an ‘elite’ audience, instead of rigorous investigation into unethical lending practices.
According to Mark Deuze (2005, pp. 445-57), a good investigative journalist possesses a sense of public service or disclosure as ‘watchdog’, objectivity, autonomy, a sense of immediacy and ethics. Ivor Shapiro (2010, p. 155) states, ‘While many journalists believe in and advocate for specific positions…most observers expect some degree of impartiality in the conduct of that work’. He argues that the investigative and reporting process must be as rigorous as possible, focussing on socially important issues to inform the public and set a public agenda (Shapiro 2010, p. 156)’. Let’s look at the application of these journalistic qualities in the two features referred to earlier.
Serial
Hae Min Lee was a popular Baltimore teenager who was murdered and buried in Leakin Park, Baltimore on January 13, 1999. Adnan Syed, her ex-boyfriend, received a life sentence for her murder. Listening to Serial (2014), it became obvious that a significant amount of information was being consolidated and disseminated by Sarah, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, and her two producers. The podcasts conveyed the continual juxtaposition of opinion and difficulty in recall of events by people connected with the case. Key witness Jay Wilds’ conflicting statements to police are used extensively to demonstrate the inherent difficulties of such an investigation. The selection of dialogue is confronting although viewers are forewarned, for example Jay’s recollection to police about Adnan’s remark, ‘That he was going to kill that bitch, referring to Hae Min’ [Episode 1].
Sources contacted by Sarah and her team did not always cooperate.[1] When this occurs, Sarah changes her approach, sourcing information such as Hae’s boyfriend Don’s trial testimony and police interview tapes with suspect Mr. S., who discovered Hae’s body in Leakin Park. By delving beyond police interview tapes and sourcing public records, Sarah revealed important character details about ‘Mr. S’ that police investigators may not have been aware of.[2] She uses trial tapes of expert opinion (e.g. city surveyors and cell tower technology experts), archived detective interviews and personal interviews with forensic psychologists, homicide detectives, teachers, friends, ‘Innocence Project’ lawyers and their teams. Particularly vital sources of information were documents accessed under the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA).
Sarah relies on intuition to pursue leads as they arise in a careful and methodical way. Expert opinion maintains investigative rigour, to supplement and make sense of disparate information and questionable alibis of the key players. The team learns from fresh perspectives, such as from Diedre Enright, the ‘Innocence Project’ lawyer. She draws the team’s attention to one critical alibi witness for Adnan, Asia McClain, interviewed later by Sarah, who wrote letters to Adnan notifying him that she saw him in the library when Hae disappeared. Asia was conspicuously overlooked by Adnan’s defence attorney, Christina Gutierrez, which Sarah proves by delving into Christina’s case files[3]. Other observations of systematic breakdown are revealed, including compromised forensic procedures. A former homicide detective confirms that material evidence is ‘corrupted’ due to it never being sent for DNA matching [Episode 7]. The retracing of Hae’s final movements by Sarah and her producer, Dana Chivvis to check the credibility of the State’s timeline further indicates an impressive commitment to the case.
The team is effectively ‘taking up the slack’ of a flawed police investigation, under the guidance of legal experts. However, experts can make errors of judgement and I wondered about Sarah’s reliance on Diedre who quickly dismissed the fact that Jay knew the location of Hae’s dumped car in Episode 12, in favour of considering murderer Ronald Lee Moore, who was released into the area thirteen days prior to Hae’s death. Diedre insists, ‘Big picture Sarah, big picture’. This would be a challenge for any reporter to remain objective given Diedre’s experience. Alterman (2008, p.4) reminds us that reporters [and editors] strive for objectivity, however in reality this is an ‘unreachable horizon’ and few are willing to openly admit any hint of bias in their reporting.
She consistently engages in critical reflection to remain objective, having spent over 40 hours in conversation with Adnan. This builds trust with her audience because she is exposing her vulnerability to a seemingly genuine ‘nice guy’, and her struggle is openly declared. Her doubt is most evident when Adnan mocks her judgement of character after speaking to him exclusively via prison telephone. His comments in episode 6, ‘I mean you don’t even know me… We only talk on the phone…For you to say I’m a great person…’, successfully incited alarm in Sarah, if not her entire audience. She demonstrates how an assumed familiarity with her sources in a murder case can leave her vulnerable to criticism and potential for psychological manipulation. Adnan Syed could indeed be capable of committing a heinous, violent crime in a dis-associative state of denial and temporary amnesia according to Charles Ewing, the forensic psychologist she interviews. Shapiro (2010, p. 155) argues that story quality relies on a journalist’s ability to be ‘independent observers of events’ that should be ‘uninfluenced by personal connections with sources or subjects’. To use a phrase from The X-Files (2008), ‘The truth is out there’ yet with respect to Sarah, it is a case of ‘I want to believe’. In the Episode 12 wrap up, Sarah admits, ‘I don’t believe any of us can really say what happened to Hae…If you asked me to swear that Adnan is innocent? I could not do it. I nurse doubt. I don’t like that I do but I do.’
The digital podcast format for Serial had been downloaded over 80 million times by February, 2016 (Hesse, 2016). The narrative is in the first person which enhances the audience’s ability to identify with Sarah. It has a warm, consistent, relaxed style, with interwoven clues being slowly teased apart. There is a strict order to the episodes, so listeners do not miss critical information along the course of the investigation. Episode 1: ‘The Alibi’ provides an intriguing introduction to the case, followed by sequential episodes sorted into lines of inquiry or themes. Finally it is consolidated in Episode 12: ‘What We Know’.
Sarah has also made enemies in the process. Jay claims in an interview with journalist, Natasha Vargas-Cooper (2014) for The Intercept, that he was never informed that audio of his police statements would appear in the Serial podcasts, for millions of people to pass character judgements. He deliberately stonewalled police due to his involvement with drugs and felt misrepresented by Sarah, and says that he has been harassed by listeners ever since. Although not a complaint, Asia McClain also did not know that her interview would end up in the podcasts. In Hesse (2016), she is quoted as saying, ‘I didn’t really know it was a podcast, because I guess nobody really knew what podcasts were then.’ The complaint by Jay implies that the Serial team’s ethics are in question, although Sarah argues in an email to Jay that: ‘I’m not out to get anyone, or to damage anyone’s reputation. I only reported information that we deemed relevant to understanding the case.’ He complains of Sarah and producer Julie Snyder turning up on his doorstep, making reference to a radio show. Jay tells Natasha “She said there was new evidence, and I said there’s no new evidence that’s gonna change what I saw: I saw Hae dead in the trunk of the car. If Adnan wants to take the stand now and explain that away, let him. But there’s no evidence that’s gonna change what I saw”. Jay also accuses Sarah or attorney Rabia Chaudry of leaking to Reddit his personal address, which led to people stalking him (Vargas-Cooper, 2014). Matthew Ricketson recommends that ‘What journalists should do is be as honest with interviewees as possible and, simultaneously, engage them and gain their trust’ (Ricketson, 2004 p. 116). I find the nature of The Intercept article questionable for its motivation in criticising Sarah’s investigation, and she does not come across as deliberately misleading, however in my opinion they should have informed the interviewees as to the podcast format.
Adnan’s request to appeal and the notoriety of the three main points revealed by Sarah’s investigation, i.e. cell tower inconsistencies, Asia being overlooked as a witness by defence counsel, and the failure to fully analyse DNA material, ultimately led to the decision by Judge Martin P. Welch for a new trial, granted on June 30, 2016. In the respective court document, Judge Welch acknowledges the considerable distribution and advocacy spurred by the Serial podcast; however the Judge maintains that Adnan’s appeal for a retrial has been considered in isolation of the podcasts (Koenig, 2016).
How to Steal the Presidency and Get Away with It
In contrast to Sarah’s empathetic journalistic style, Greg Palast conforms to the muck-raking style of investigative journalist. John Pilger claims he writes in similar wise-guy style to Walter Winchell (Pilger, 2005). According to former Toronto newspaper and radio journalist Alex Barris, Winchell is a ‘scandalmonger’ with an interest in exposing ‘subversive’ persons (Barris 1976, p. 56).
A ‘nose for news’ is an intuitive quality for ‘news-judgement’ and the choices a journalist makes in how information is interpreted and conveyed (Zelizer 2004 p. 23). Sarah and Greg both possess this quality. Greg exercised his natural suspicions after hearing from a fellow researcher about a Palm Beach Post article pertaining to 8,000 Texan citizens wrongfully purged from voting registries. He thus couldn’t resist the opportunity to explore this extraordinary ‘error’ further, like a hound-dog, sniffing out evidence of corruption along the way. In obtaining a leaked copy of two CD-ROM disks from Harris’ office (he doesn’t reveal his source), Greg reviewed the registry entries and noted that 57,700 voters were wrongfully listed as felons, the ‘scrub’ lists showing absurdly falsified dates for alleged offences. Most were African-American and Hispanic, the vast majority being Democrats (Pilger 2005 p. 465). Greg’s willingness to inform an eager British public about insidious corruption during the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaign, as the U.S. press conspicuously chose to look the other way, fuelled his need to expose Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris at an international level.
He walks a fine line with ethical considerations, particularly concerning defamation, using a tongue-in-cheek style of humour in his writing. In this feature, Greg shows that he is willing to openly name and mock both the incompetent and the corrupt, with every intention of fulfilling his public duty of exposing a compromised ‘democratic’ voting practice, however unpopular that makes him. As I read ‘How to Steal the Presidency and get away with it’, his relentless determination to unearth the truth, laced with superbly-crafted humour directed at powerful political figures and their administration staff, is unflinchingly daring. It reminded me of comments in Pilger (2005) typically directed at respected journalist, Seymour Hersh, who exposed the 1968 slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai by U.S. soldiers; namely, ‘You know, Hersh has gone too far this time’. Seymour Hersh ‘…is what an investigative journalist ought to be: an outsider who knows how to mine on the inside, who protects his sources and is proud of his enemies’ (Pilger, 2005, p. 87).
Greg relies on expert sources including BBC researchers, a Harvard Law professor, demographic experts and the Civil Rights Commission for fact-checking and legal perspective on voting rights. He even had an insider from Jeb Bush’s office who revealed covertly, ‘the courts tell us to do this, and we do that.’ Bush’s office was ordered by the court to cease interference ‘in the civil rights of ex-cons who had the right to vote’ (Pilger 2005, p. 475).
The results of his initial consultation with a key Tampa statistician prompted The Observer article with the contentious headline, ‘Black-out in Florida’. He writes, ‘ChoicePoint, is under fire for misuse of personal data in state computers in Pennsylvania. ChoicePoint’s board is loaded with Republican sugar daddies…’ The article sparked an expensive investigation using Salons’ political team. Greg then writes the impressive headline, ‘Florida’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Voter Rolls’. This is pure muck-raking style, with a confronting article to follow. He writes: ‘Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to provide lists for ‘cleansing’ voter rolls.’ It is yet again damning of democratic process in Florida and the willingness of ChoicePoint to hand out personal data. By now he reinvigorates the investigation with another instalment for The Observer in London, entitled ‘A Blacklist Burning for Bush’. In it he quotes David Bosistas, voting demographic expert with his disdain for Florida enlisting the help of ChoicePoint as, ‘a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters’. Greg appears to have an exceptional ordering strategy for disclosure with articles that become systematically more damaging, with a clear end point to his investigation. In the lead-in to The Nation article ‘Florida’s Disappeared Voters’, he writes, ‘It was now 5 February 2001 – so President Bush could read this report from the White House’. Unsurprisingly he is making enemies. Receiving a hostile and disparaging phone call at 2am by an irate Marty Fagan, ChoicePoint’s media communications manager, indicates to me that he is making considerable progress in holding the corrupt to account, is clearly on to a politically scandalous story, takes insults in his stride and as such, should be equally ‘proud of his enemies’. It was only after Bush was elected that larger news agencies took up Palast’s expose, with The Washington Post taking notice an astonishing seven months later.
Conclusion
Why have these journalists been so influential in their investigations? In John Pilger’s book, ‘Tell me no lies’, the author describes Greg Palast as ‘indefatigable’ (Pilger 2005, p. 465). Sarah Koenig and her team also demonstrate an indefatigable commitment to seek the truth in an investigation with numerous twists that inevitably lead back to speculation and uncertainty. They both use traditional methods for investigation, using quality expert option, interviewing and extensive perusal of documentation. Sarah Koenig uses digital podcasts to report her findings, whereas Greg Palast uses traditional newsprint to report his. Their fact-checking is meticulous. In Sarah’s case, by reaching millions of listeners, the resulting exposure suggests it has influenced a retrial. Greg Palast selects his news broadcasters carefully to ensure maximum impact, even if that means capitalising on the story’s popularity in the London, effectively showing up the conspicuous failure of U.S. journalists to take up the story, a form of censorship by omission.
In reviewing the premise, they are maintaining the fourth estate to ensure democratic process is adhered to and that powerful interests are held to account. Sarah Koenig helped to expose a flawed criminal justice investigation, including the inadequacies of Adnan’s defence counsel, and Greg Palast exposed a politically corrupt election campaign. Greg’s story in particular, is a story of high social importance which sets a public agenda in having a more transparent and equitable voting system. Yes, he may be perceived as having gone too far this time, as would any competent investigative journalist, hungry for the ‘scoop of a lifetime’.
References:
Alterman, E 2008, ‘Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper’, The New Yorker, 31 March 2008, retrieved 17 August 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/out-of-print
Barris, A 1976, Stop The Presses! The Newspaperman in American Films, A.S. Barnes & Co., South Brunswick and New York
Deuze, M 2005,‘What Is Journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered’, Journalism, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 442-64.
Hesse, M 2016, ‘‘Serial’ takes the stand: How a podcast became a character in its own narrative’, The Washington Post, February 8, retrieved 18 August, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/when-a-post-conviction-hearing-feels-like-a-sequel-the-weirdness-of-serial-back-on-the-stand/2016/02/08/b3782c60-2a49-48f7-9480-a34dd9e07ab6_story.html
Koenig, S 2016, ‘Judge orders new trial for Adnan Syed’. Available at : https://serialpodcast.org/posts/2016/07/judge-orders-new-trial-for-adnan-syed
Pilger, J 2005, Tell Me No Lies, Vintage, U.K.
Ricketson, M 2004, Writing Feature Stories, Allen & Unwin, NSW.
Serial: Season One, 2014, podcast, This American Life, October, 2014. Retrieved 8 August, 2016, https://serialpodcast.org/season-one
Shapiro, I., 2010, ‘Evaluating Journalism’, Journalism Practice, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 143-162.
Starkman, D 2014, ‘The Great Story’ Columbia Journalism Review, January-February 2014, available at: https://www.cjr.org/feature/the_great_story.php
Starr, P., 2009, ‘Goodbye to the age of newspapers (hello to a new era of corruption), The New Republic, 4 March, 2009, pp. 28-35.
The X-Files: I Want To Believe 2008, film, 20th Century Fox, United States
Vargas-Cooper, N 2014, ‘Exclusive: Jay, key witness from ‘Serial’ tells his story for first time, parts 1-3’, The Intercept, 30 December, retrieved 17 August, 2016 https://theintercept.com/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-wilds-star-witness-adnan-syed-serial-case-pt-1/
https://theintercept.com/2014/12/30/exclusive-jay-part-2/
https://theintercept.com/2014/12/31/jay-speaks-part-3/
Zelizer, B 2004, ‘Defining Journalism’, in: Taking journalism seriously: news and the academy, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
[1] Hae Min’s parents, suspect Mr. S. and Hae’s boyfriend Don, all declined an interview.
[2] Mr S. had a disturbing history of indecent exposure, including in front of a female police officer, and a willingness to falsify police statements.
[3] Sarah finds the note: ‘Asia plus boyfriend, saw him in library 2:15 to 3:15’ (Episode 1) which contradicts the State’s timeline. Asia claims never to have been contacted by the attorney to testify.