British nonprofit news organisation
The
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
, typically abbreviated to
TBIJ
or "the Bureau", is a
nonprofit
news organisation based in
London
that was founded in 2010 to pursue "public interest" investigations.
[1]
The Bureau works with publishers and broadcasters to maximise the impact of its investigations.
[2]
Since its founding, it has collaborated with
Panorama
,
Newsnight
, and
File on 4
at the
BBC
,
Channel 4
News
and
Dispatches
, as well as the
Financial Times
,
The Daily Telegraph
, and
The Sunday Times
, among others.
[3]
The Bureau has covered a wide range of stories and won many awards including for its coverage of the drone wars and investigation of "joint enterprise" murder convictions.
[4]
Its CEO/Editor in Chief is Rozina Breen.
[5]
History
[
edit
]
The Bureau was established in 2010 by former
Sunday Times
reporter
Elaine Potter
, who worked on exposing the
Thalidomide scandal
, and her husband
David Potter
, who founded software company
Psion
. Initial funding for the project came from the Potters' charitable foundation, which committed £2 million.
[6]
Elaine cites one of her inspirations being the creation two years previous of
ProPublica
, a nonprofit organisation based in New York with a similar remit, also funded philanthropically.
[7]
In the run-up to launch,
Stephen Grey
was acting editor
[8]
until the appointment of
Iain Overton
as its first permanent managing editor.
[9]
Ian Overton was succeeded by former
Sunday Times
Insight
editor
Christopher Hird
in December 2012
[10]
and
Rachel Oldroyd
became Managing Editor in 2014.
[11]
Rozina Breen became CEO/Editor in Chief in 2022.
Notable investigations
[
edit
]
US raid on Yakla, Yemen
[
edit
]
On 29 January 2017, a
United States
-led Special Operations Forces operation was carried out in
Yakla Village
,
Qifah District
,
[12]
in the
Al Bayda
province in central
Yemen
. It was the first raid authorized by President
Donald Trump
,
[13]
The US military initially denied there were any civilian casualties, but later declared it was investigating if they occurred.
[14]
An investigation by the Bureau on the ground found that nine children under the age of 13, with the youngest victim a three-month-old baby were killed. Beside the nine children killed, one pregnant woman was also killed.
[15]
The Bureau's story was picked up by
The Guardian
,
[16]
Newsweek
[17]
and many other media outlets.
Bell Pottinger operations in Iraq
[
edit
]
The Bureau working with the
Sunday Times
revealed on 2 October 2016 that the
Pentagon
paid British PR firm
Bell Pottinger
$540 million to create fake terrorist videos, fake news articles for Arab news channels and propaganda videos.
[18]
[19]
An investigation by Abigail Fielding-Smith and Crofton Black revealed the details of the multimillion-pound operation. Bell Pottinger was paid by the
US Department of Defence
(DoD) for five contracts from May 2007 to December 2011, according to
The Times
and the Bureau.
[20]
[21]
Lord Bell confirmed that Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the
CIA
and the
U.S. National Security Council
on its work in Iraq.
[
citation needed
]
Deaths from antibiotic resistance
[
edit
]
The Bureau is running a continuing investigation into the threat posed by
antibiotic resistant bacteria
. In December 2016, Madlen Davies working with the
Sunday Telegraph
revealed that superbugs were killing at least twice as many people as the government estimated.
[22]
In October 2016, Andrew Wasley working with
The Guardian
revealed that pork contaminated with
MRSA
was being sold at
Asda
and
Sainsbury's
.
[23]
Covert drone war
[
edit
]
The Bureau monitors drone strike casualties in
Pakistan
,
Yemen
and Somalia. In Yemen and Somalia, these figures also include victims of drone strikes, airstrikes, missile attacks and ground operations. Unlike other organisations that track such deaths, the Bureau focuses on identifying non-militant deaths, including children.
[24]
The data from this research is published online.
[25]
Jack Serle was one of three Bureau reporters who won the
Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
in 2013 for "their research into Barack Obama’s drone wars and their consequences for civilians".
[26]
Binary options
[
edit
]
A series of articles in 2016 written by Melanie Newman exposed the "real wolves of Wall Street" involved in
binary options
fraud. According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau's head of crime, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe, this is the biggest fraud being perpetrated against British targets today with police receiving an average of two reports of binary trading fraud a day, with the average investor losing £16,000. Fyfe described this as "just the tip of the iceberg" because most of the frauds are not reported to the police because the fraudsters are usually located abroad.
[27]
[28]
Joint enterprise
[
edit
]
In February 2016, the
UK Supreme Court
ruled that the law on "
joint enterprise
" in murder cases, which allows for several people to be charged with the same offence even though they may have played very different roles in the crime, had been wrongly interpreted.
[29]
This followed a long-running Bureau investigation into joint enterprise.
[30]
The Bureau found that black British men were more than three times as likely to be serving life sentences as a result of a joint enterprise conviction than those in the prison population overall.
[31]
Three Bureau reporters ? Maeve McClenaghan,
Melanie McFadyean
and Rachel Stevenson ? won the 2013?14
Bar Council
Legal Reporting Award for the coverage.
[32]
Europe's missing millions
[
edit
]
An investigation in collaboration with the
Financial Times
into how the
European Union
structural funds
were used, and whether the policy was achieving what it set out to do.
[33]
It found that millions of euros were being siphoned off by organised crime syndicates, and that money was being used to support multinational corporations instead of small and medium-sized businesses, including help to finance a
British American Tobacco
cigarette factory.
[33]
The Bureau co-produced an episode of
File on 4
with the BBC on the story
[34]
that received the UACES Reporting Europe Prize.
[35]
Lobbying's hidden influence
[
edit
]
Public relations
firm
Bell Pottinger
were the centre of a Bureau covert filming operation published in
The Independent
.
In the footage senior executives claim that they can get
UK prime minister
David Cameron
to speak to the
Chinese premier
on behalf of one of their clients within 24 hours, and that they have a team which "sorts" negative
Wikipedia
coverage.
[36]
Bell Pottinger
subsequently filed a complaint with the
Press Complaints Commission
about the investigation, which was rejected.
[37]
Deaths in police custody
[
edit
]
An investigation in collaboration with
The Independent
found that the number of people who had died after being forcibly restrained whilst in police custody was higher than official figures showed. This was due to the exclusion of anyone who had died following restraint but had not at that point been formally arrested.
[38]
The Bureau also reported their findings with the BBC in an episode of
File on 4
.
[39]
The story won an
Amnesty International Media Award
.
[40]
Iraq war logs
[
edit
]
The
Iraq war logs
were 391,832 classified
United States Army
field reports leaked to
WikiLeaks
,
[41]
which shared them with a number of news organisations, including the Bureau, before publishing them online in their entirety.
[42]
The Bureau worked with
Al Jazeera
[43]
and
Channel 4
[44]
to analyse the documents which detail torture,
summary executions
, and war crimes carried out by US forces.
[45]
The Bureau's reporting received an
Amnesty International Media Award
.
[46]
Russia Report
[
edit
]
In 2019, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism started a crowdfunding exercise to raise funds for legal action to force the British government to release the "Russia Report" detailing the
Intelligence and Security Committee
's investigation into
Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum
.
[47]
Cyprus Confidential
[
edit
]
In November 2023, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism joined with the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
,
Paper Trail Media
[
de
]
and 69 media partners including
Distributed Denial of Secrets
and the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
(OCCRP) and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories
[48]
[49]
to produce the '
Cyprus Confidential
' report on the financial network which supports the regime of
Vladimir Putin
, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned.
[50]
[51]
Government officials including Cyprus president
Nikos Christodoulides
[52]
and European lawmakers
[53]
began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours,
[52]
calling for reforms and launching probes.
[54]
[55]
Criticism
[
edit
]
The Bureau was seriously criticised after the
Newsnight
McAlpine affair in November 2012. BBC
Newsnight
broadcast an investigation of the North Wales child abuse scandal. The reporter was
Angus Stickler
who had been seconded to the BBC by the Bureau. Stickler's broadcast report included claims that a prominent, but unnamed, former Conservative politician had sexually abused children during the 1970s.
[56]
Users of
Twitter
and other social media immediately identified him as
Lord McAlpine
. After
The Guardian
reported that it was mistaken identity, Lord McAlpine issued a strong denial.
[57]
The accuser unreservedly apologised, admitting that, as soon as he saw a photograph of the individual, he realised he had been mistaken.
[58]
BBC director-general
George Entwistle
resigned later that day.
[56]
The Bureau's Managing Editor Ian Overton and Angus Stickler also resigned.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
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.
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- ^
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- ^
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,
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- ^
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- ^
Kanter, Jake (3 March 2022).
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.
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- ^
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.
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.
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- ^
"Wadi Yakla, Yemen Area Map"
.
- ^
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- ^
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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"Soap operas and fakery: selling peace in Iraq"
.
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.
- ^
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"Fake News and False Flags"
.
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- ^
Davies, Madlen (11 December 2016).
"Superbugs killing twice as many people as government says"
.
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2017
.
- ^
Wasley, Andrew; Kjeld Hansen; Fiona Harvey (3 October 2016).
"Revealed: MRSA variant found in British pork at Asda and Sainsbury's"
.
The Guardian
. Retrieved
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2017
– via www.theguardian.com.
- ^
Singh, Ritika (25 October 2013).
"Drone Strikes Kill Innocent People. Why Is It So Hard to Know How Many?"
.
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- ^
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"There's Not Enough Data On Civilian Drone Casualties"
.
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- ^
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,
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. Accessed 25 October 2015.
- ^
Newman, Melanie (2 November 2016).
"
'Killers having lunch': The real life Wolves of Wall Street"
.
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. Retrieved
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2017
.
[
non-primary source needed
]
- ^
Weinglass, Simona (26 June 2020).
"How the US Justice Department let an alleged Israeli fraud kingpin get away"
.
www.timesofisrael.com
.
- ^
Stevenson, Rachel (19 February 2016).
"Joint Enterprise: Praise for Bureau's role in run-up to historic Supreme Court decision"
.
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.
- ^
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"
'Joint enterprise' prosecution figures released"
.
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.
- ^
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.
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.
- ^
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,
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- ^
a
b
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,
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- ^
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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"
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External links
[
edit
]