Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/investigative-reporting-in-the-gulf/)
Intrepid journalists are still conducting investigations on countries within the Arab Gulf region, but due to political repression and other press freedom issues, they’ve had to report from afar or build and operate their independent media sites while in exile.
In Tunisia, where the first protests of the Arab Spring took place, a start-up with a focus on investigative journalism and narrative storytelling is attempting to exploit the country’s relative media freedom to win over readers.
Syrian journalists have gained extensive experience documenting possible human rights violations and war crimes by the Russian military. GIJN spoke with several of these reporters to understand the lessons they learned, and how investigative journalists can cover the Ukraine invasion more effectively.
GIJN Arabic interviews BBC reporter Emir Nader about how his investigative team verified the leak of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s final, frantic phone calls before his 23-year-long dictatorship crumbled in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring uprising.
One of the newest members of GIJN, the Jordanian investigative site 7iber, began as a blog in 2007 but has since matured into an online magazine bravely covering issues in a hostile press environment.
Katie McQue, a British freelance journalist that spent five years reporting from Dubai covering human rights and migration alongside her “business” beats of energy, healthcare, and finance, speaks to GIJN about her work and the best practices reporters can adopt when covering forced labor and human trafficking in the region.
Open source tools like the Yemeni Archive have allowed investigative journalists to track the impact of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in the Yemen civil war as well as identify Western allies’ role in possible war crimes or abuses.