20 January 2021
Cine Club:
About COLLECTIVE (COLECTIV): Director Alexander Nanau follows a crack team of investigators at the Romanian newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor as they try to uncover a vast health-care fraud that enriched moguls and politicians and led to the deaths of innocent citizens.
Richard Norton-Taylor, veteran, much-garlanded national security reporter and author of The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain, came (virtually) to the CIJ for an informal conversation with CIJ Director James Harkin about his experience as a reporter for the Guardian and the challenges faced by investigative journalists, the development of the national security state and the pace of its surveillance apparatus, and, after his pioneering work on verbatim theatre, the crucial importance of new kinds of documentary storytelling.
29 January 2020
CIJxICA Talks:
The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and the ICA present Closed Circuit, a series of broadcast discussions on the status of information in the age of digital media. For the second episode, writer Simon Akam, journalist and editor Joseph Farrell, lawyer Mary Inman, New York Times-bestselling author Tom Mueller, and former assistant to Harvey Weinstein Zelda Perkins discuss the controversial publication of protected information.
30 October 2019
CIJxICA Talks:
The CIJ and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) present Closed Circuit, a series of broadcast discussions on the status of information in the age of digital media. Bringing together figures from the worlds of journalism, politics, media theory and the arts, the series spans state-sponsored propaganda, ‘fake news’, revised histories, and the role of non-disclosure agreements and whistle-blowers in the shaping of public perceptions.
How do Chinese young people use new media like WeChat and Baidu and how has it changed their lives and relationships? Amid censorship, blocking and the advanced Chinese surveillance state, how much can they trust it and how does surveillance change their behaviour?
Amid the closure of some traditional outlets and the fracturing of traditional boundaries between left and right, what is the future of radical journalism? How much can it borrow from the outrage-fuelled world of new media, and how far is it in danger of taking refuge in echo chambers of its own making?
Amid the rise of populism and surveillance apparatuses and the fragility of liberal democracies, what does it mean to be subversive in the contemporary era? Srećko Horvat, one of the most exciting new radical philosophers, came to the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) to argue for the value of a genuinely subversive journalism and a fresh kind of radical internationalism.
In February 2019, The Cairncross Review published its long-awaited recommendations to protect high-quality, public interest news: tax relief to support local news and investigative journalism, a new Institute for Public Interest News overseeing an innovation fund, fresh obligations on Google and Facebook to promote trust in the information they disseminate.
5 February 2019
#LOGANCIJ:
What can the death of Jamal Khashoggi tell us about the sophisticated machinery of surveillance in the Gulf, Turkey and beyond? David Kirkpatrick, who investigated the Khashoggi case for The New York Times, in conversation with Matthew Hedges.
Seymour Hersh is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of Reporter: A Memoir. From his reports on the massacre at My Lai, to his exposure of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, to his attempts to get to the bottom of the circumstances of Osama Bin Laden’s death and the conflict in Syria, Seymour Hersh has over five decades made a reputation as one of the world’s most acclaimed investigative journalists.
Pulitzer-prize winner Lawrence Wright’s career as a staff writer for The New Yorker has taken him from in-depth, narrative reporting of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to developments within America’s neglected heartlands.
This years OXFAM scandal brought to light some serious questions for the international development community. At a time when aid agencies and charities are prone to seemingly widespread sexual abuse and impropriety, best-selling author and journalist Antony Loewenstein’s latest film Disaster Capitalism investigates whether the industry is exploiting development and aid funds to profiteer from growing inequality and poverty.
Since taking over as executive editor of The Washington Post since 2013, Martin “Marty” Baron has led something of a resurgence at the paper. Before that he was editor of The Boston Globe for a decade, during which time he led its investigation into the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse in the city which became the film Spotlight.
Based on her experience of writing Two Sisters, her latest book about two Norwegian sisters who leave their home near Oslo for jihad Syria, Åsne Seierstad came to the CIJ to talk about how to report the conflict in Syria, domestic Islamic extremism and the rise of the Islamic State group.
To coincide with International Women’s Day, Alexis Okeowo, staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky, came to the CIJ to talk about the untold, incredible stories of how ordinary women in Africa are against fundamentalism and extremism, from the Lord’s Resistance Army to Boko Haram.
Nearly 20 ago, Zelda Perkins reluctantly signed a non-disclosure agreement with Miramax that prevented her from speaking out about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged harassment and sexual assault of her and a colleague.
12 February 2018
#LOGANCIJ:
In the second of our series of talks looking at how investigative journalism can be turned into a story, veteran foreign correspondent Alex Perry comes to the CIJ to talk about how he and journalists like him are increasingly working with film and production companies to fund their investigations, and about the writing and selling of his latest book The Good Mothers, the true story about of a group of women who took on the world’s most powerful mafia.
26 January 2018
#LOGANCIJ:
To coincide with The Post, a thriller about The Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers about the war in Vietnam, the CIJ, in collaboration with Curzon Goldsmiths cinema, presented a showing of the film and a critical discussion of its themes with veteran national security journalist and The Washington Post reporter Ted Gup.
23 January 2018
#LOGANCIJ:
Misha Glenny’s critically acclaimed book McMafia tells the story of how brutal networks of criminals have morphed into powerful international crime syndicates. As the book had been adapted for a major BBC1 series, he came to the CIJ to talk about how investigative journalism can be turned into story and serial television.
16 January 2018
#LOGANCIJ:
Often perceived as dull, the secretive world of international accountancy has grown, cockroach-like, in stature even as the financial world crashed in 2008. Safe from real censure, the world’s biggest accountancy firms have evolved into behemoths – there to encourage tax avoidance, to prop up anti-democratic movements, to push sometimes damaging deregulation, even to infiltrate the machinery of the state.
6 December 2017
#LOGANCIJ:
An American freelance journalist who’s lived for many years in Syria and the Middle East, Theo Padnos’s unorthodox style of undercover reporting from Yemeni Madrassas had already made him enemies before he was kidnapped by Al-Qaeda in Northern Syria in Autumn 2012.
2 November 2017
#LOGANCIJ:
Is our news diet making us ill? As the mainstream print media retrenches and new kinds of partisan,“activist”, corporate and fact-free “alternative” media fill the vacuum, the media we consume is full ofmore hidden additives than ever.
10 October 2017
#LOGANCIJ:
In the wake of President Trump, there’s been a welcome resurgence of interest in investigative journalism in the United States. But what should its role be? Lowell Bergman, one of the world’s most famous and respected investigative journalists alive whose investigation into the tobacco industry inspired the film The Insider, came to London to discuss the state of investigative journalism and the dilemmas which confront the profession, including the growing information war between the US and Russia over leaks, hacks and new media propaganda.
13 September 2017
#LOGANCIJ:
Maria Alyokhina, a political activist, artist and founding member of the punk collective Pussy Riot, was convicted in 2012 of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison.
