Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World

INTRODUCTION

ANYA SCHIFFRIN

As newspapers in many countries today are in crisis—hit by declines in circulation and lack of advertising—it is refreshing to be reminded of some of the moments in history when reporting really mattered. This book is a collection of pieces that launched campaigns, exposed military atrocities, and called for justice for the downtrodden and the colonized. Reading these articles, one is amazed at how contemporary many seem and how much in common the journalist of our time has with the journalist of fifty or one hundred years ago.

Most journalists working today have little idea of the breadth of exposure reporting¹ that has been published around the world, not just now but in the past. In the United States, we think of the muckrakers of the Progressive era and their crusades for food safety, or against big oil and banking. South Africans may know Drum magazine, which was published in the 1950s and ’60s and gave voice to a number of black writers who wrote about life under apartheid. In much of Latin America, India, and Africa there is a familiar legacy of anticolonial writing as well as a type of journalism known as development communications that was born in the postcolonial era.

But although journalists may know the history of reporting in their own countries, they don’t necessarily know anyone else’s. One of the purposes of Global Muckraking is to bring together pieces that have been published around the world since the nineteenth century. Leading scholars, journalists, and activists provide the historical context in which they were published and explain the impact they had. By placing these pieces next to each other and highlighting their similarities, I hope this book will educate, inspire, and delight.

Even more, exploring the historical roots of contemporary journalism shows that battles that make the headlines today—against corruption, human rights abuses, and corporate exploitation—are subjects that journalists have been exposing for more than a century. The fact that journalists have been calling attention to some of the same problems for more than a hundred years might make one despondent, but it shouldn’t: their writing had significant impact even when it was not as fully effective as could be hoped. In many cases, if not most, the worst abuses were halted. Journalism succeeded in mobilizing public pressure or at least in engaging the elites who had decision-making powers so that they could take (or not take) necessary measures. That the battles are still going on should simply remind us that new abuses, new forms of corruption, are always emerging, providing new opportunities and new responsibilities for the media.

A Surprising Modernity

Not only have the same subjects been covered for many years, but the tactics used to wield influence and to persuade are also still in use. Some examples include fair trade campaigns and consumer boycotts, public relations efforts, and corporate and government pressure on journalists to toe the line. Any journalist working today will relate to much of what took place in the last century.

Moreover, it turns out that many of the questions we grapple with today about business models for media—the role and impact of investigative reporting, the line between journalism and advocacy, the financing of investigative reporting—are questions that have come up in the past. For this reason, it’s instructive to take a look back.

A Historical Moment

This book begins with a moment in history when there was a wave of committed and campaigning journalism. Social unease with the excesses of colonialism and industrialization, missionary zeal, the rise of the labor movement, and a general climate of intellectual ferment and political activism as well as the increasing ease of communication all contributed. In the United States the muckrakers benefited from a rise in paid circulation, which they thought would liberate them from the pressures of advertising. Overseas, some of the large media houses we know today were getting started or establishing themselves. Audiences were growing thanks in part to the railway and telegraph, which made it easier to gather and distribute news. Newspapers and pamphlets brought together communities of people both physically and ideologically. Once connected, these audiences began to have shared views partly because being able to read the same documents helped create and shape public opinion across regions and even continents. Ideas like slavery being evil or colonialism being wrong could and did spread, partly because of the printed word. Some of the pieces of journalism in this book reflect this broadened awareness that crossed national boundaries.

But many of the stories told here are local in scope, and it was years before they caught the attention of a global audience. Geographic distance, the lapse of time, language barriers, government censorship, a natural interest in the news of one’s own country, and the lack of commercial appeal are all reasons some of the stories didn’t spread at the time and why so much of this global reporting is no longer remembered. Another reason is the simple fact that journalism is about what happened today or yesterday. It is about news, not history, even if journalism is often described as the first draft of history.

King Leopold’s Ghost

We start with a piece by the writer Adam Hochschild, who introduces the work of E.D. Morel, the journalist who campaigned long and hard against the brutal conditions in the Belgian Congo. Morel was so outraged by the situation in the Congo that in the early part of the twentieth century he started a newspaper, the West African Mail. Although the paper ran advertising from companies that did business in the Congo, Morel exposed the forced labor and torture endemic to the rubber business that enriched Belgian king Leopold and others involved in the growing international market for vulcanized tires. Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, published in 1998, was a bestseller that brought home to a wide audience the violence of colonialism in the Congo and the role of the campaigners who exposed and fought against it. In King Leopold’s Ghost, Hochschild explains how journalists and missionaries raised awareness about the terrible conditions. Exposing these atrocities became a critical part of campaigning against them, and Hochschild argues that, although rooted in the antislavery movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the campaign for reform in the Congo was in fact a modern human rights campaign.

King Leopold’s Ghost introduced millions of readers to three men who sounded the alarm about the Congo and wrote about the terrible conditions there, often drawing on reports from missionaries who had gone up the river and seen for themselves what was taking place: the African American soldier and writer George Washington Williams, E.D. Morel, and British consul Roger Casement. Williams and Morel illustrate the global nature of global muckraking. Neither was from the Congo but they wrote about it. Nor were they from Belgium, but they still sought to influence its government.

Hochschild describes the propaganda war that raged over two decades as missionaries and former abolitionists campaigned intensively for an improvement in conditions and for the king to give up his claim to the land.² King Leopold responded to the criticism with public relations tactics that are all too familiar today. The king hired lobbyists, charmed journalists with invitations to his palace, and even funded a magazine telling his version of events. The Truth About the Congo, as it was called, was handed out to passengers taking the comfortable night train to Brussels.

Hochschild makes clear that the task of investigative reporting has often not been an easy one. George Washington Williams, who was instrumental in exposing the abuses in the Congo, founded his own newspaper to get his message out, interviewed King Leopold, wrote the searing Letter to King Leopold, and was accused of libel. A story not unfamiliar to today’s journalists.

After reading King Leopold’s Ghost, I wondered what other hard-hitting journalism was exposing similar conditions in developing countries. Were journalists also covering Latin America and Asia in the same way? Where could I find their work? What happened next to Morel and Casement? Following the trail of Casement and Morel led me to other important episodes of global exposure journalism in very different parts of the world. There was, in fact, a treasure trove of writing from around the world, as the articles collected here make clear.

From Congo Crusaders to Amazon Advocates

Casement’s subsequent story is described in The Devil and Mr. Casement, written by historian Jordan Goodman, who also has a piece in this book. At the turn of the last century, conditions for rubber workers in the Peruvian Amazon were brutal. Benjamin Saldaña Rocca had bravely covered the subject in his newspaper La Sanción, in Iquitos, Peru’s main Amazonian city. But word didn’t spread internationally until a young engineer, Walter Hardenburg, brought copies of La Sanción to London and shared them with the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society,³ a campaigning organization founded in the 1830s to protect the rights of indigenous people. Saldaña Rocca had been writing about the Peruvian Amazon Company, which was listed in London, and the resulting pressure spurred the foreign office to send Roger Casement to investigate. Casement’s report was published in 1912 and estimated that thirty thousand indigenous people had died during the twelve years that the Peruvian Amazon Company had been operating. The result of the reporting and the campaign was further investigations by the U.S., Peruvian, and UK governments and arrest warrants for some company officials. Goodman notes that in the end the campaigning didn’t have much impact, arguing that it was World War I and the growth of rubber in Malaya that weakened the rubber trade in Peru.

But the story of the journalism and the campaign illustrates the point made by communications scholar Clifford Bob in his book The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism. Bob argues that in the crowded world of good causes, knowing how to get attention is key, and local causes are often not taken up internationally unless they can find support from overseas campaigning organizations that can serve as the intermediaries between the local NGOs and the international community.

Corporate Conscience

Next on my reading list—chasing the trail of global muckraking, a trail in which Casement and Morel once again make an appearance—came two books about the journalists who exposed the conditions on the cocoa plantations in West Africa more than one hundred years ago. Lowell Satre’s book Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business and Chocolate Islands: Cocoa Slavery and Colonial Africa, written by Catherine Higgs, describe how the renowned Cadbury family grappled with the question of working conditions on the African cocoa plantations of its suppliers. Just as companies today worry about their supply chains, so did the Quaker, abolitionist families that ran Britain’s top chocolate companies. They weren’t sure whether to boycott their suppliers and needed to know whether the laborers on the plantations were there of their own free will or if they were slaves.⁴

It took about eight years for the Cadburys to decide to boycott their suppliers in São Tomé and Príncipe. Along the way there were dueling press coverage, fact-finding reports, and lawsuits brought by the Cadburys against newspapers that accused them of dawdling instead of boycotting. Roger Casement appears in this story as he goes to Angola in 1902⁵ to check out conditions there, and campaigning journalist E.D. Morel sides with the Cadburys. This would be surprising, except that William Cadbury funded Morel’s newspaper and his Congo Reform Association.⁶ By 1909 the British chocolatiers were persuaded that it was time to boycott African cocoa beans. The U.S. manufacturers weren’t, and their demand for cocoa drove up world prices, showing once again that boycotts work only if everyone sticks to them.

Reading these books made me want to read nineteenth-century newspapers, so off I went to the library. Some of the newspapers were hard to find and had deteriorated. Looking through newspaper collections in Calcutta and Delhi (probably the best in India), I found torn pages and missing copies. Other times, the paper crumbled in my hands. The digitization of newspapers has not happened quickly enough to save these back issues. Even when technology has intervened, digitized versions are hard to read and search and lack the context that comes with being able to hold and smell the hard copy of an entire newspaper or year of newspapers.

Where the holdings are in good shape—at the British Library, Library of Congress, or Columbia University, for example—the collections are being moved off-site, making browsing through them almost impossible. Orders need to be placed days in advance, and there are limits to how many newspapers will be brought out at one time. Having to wait can make it difficult to follow a thread or quickly move to the next article in a series.

Hidden Gems

Since the newspapers can be so hard to find, the collection of writings in this book is even more important. Historians and scholars who have spent years tracking down and studying reporting from around the world have saved us the trouble by painstakingly going through their files or back to research libraries to find their favorite examples, resulting in some gems that, until now, remained lost in time.

Newspapers as we know them now didn’t really exist until the turn of the twentieth century. Looking at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers from India and West Africa, I was struck by how much they resemble today’s blogs. They are often random and personal, containing information that can be inconsistent, unpredictable, and attributable to a variety of sources, not all of them reliable.

The range of what was considered news also varied greatly. One unusual story I read while in the Library of Congress that was deemed worthy of print was a two-part series about a man kicked off a boat near Malta. The coverage included a debate in the letters column about whether he was taken off because he had a contagious disease, or whether he was kicked out by the rapacious captain who wanted to re-rent the cabin to a large family who would pay more for their passage. On a wintery morning in Calcutta, I stumbled upon a long article about a parliamentary debate on the sanitary conditions for coolies working in Assam, alongside a letter from London about how everyone was reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch this season.

And yet despite the noise and the randomness of news choices, there was plenty of serious writing being done in the nineteenth century. Of course, it was not in the same style as today’s newspaper articles. But it was there. Sometimes it was turgid coverage of parliamentary discussions. At other times, there was more passion and more editorializing and more campaigning. Often, the style was quietly amusing and witty. It was a different kind of writing than we usually see today but its impact could be profound. There were global campaigns that used information and journalism, as well as pamphlets, public meetings, and government investigations, to raise awareness, and they accomplished their advocacy aims.

Across countries and decades, many journalists went to great lengths and took personal risks to expose injustice and wrongdoing. In some cases they became activists and crusaders, campaigning to bring the perpetrators to account. In other cases, the atrocities spawned the journalism. Benjamin Saldaña Rocca in Peru and E.D. Morel in the Congo were so outraged by the abuses they saw that they became journalists and founded newspapers in order to expose the injustices they had witnessed in the gathering of rubber. The newspapers and pamphlets (like today’s blogs) that resulted were often not financially sustainable and it sometimes took years for the writing to have an impact. But they carried on. This book is full of examples.

Even when justice wasn’t served, these intrepid reporters at least tried to bear witness and were sometimes vindicated by history. One example is Gareth Jones, whose exposure of the famine in Ukraine under Stalin may not have saved lives at the time, but it set the record straight for the future. Another is Patricia Verdugo, who wrote a chilling account of one of the death squads operating in Pinochet’s Chile. Her journalism—with its emphasis on evidence and establishing the chronology of events—ended up becoming valuable testimony about what happened in that dark period of the country’s history and was used later by investigators seeking to establish the facts of what had happened.

National Bias

National bias colored journalism then as it does now. One of the points that Adam Hochschild makes in King Leopold’s Ghost is that this bias also colored the debate about conditions in the Congo. Journalists lined up on different sides, depending on which country they were from, with the Belgian and German reporters defending the conditions in King Leopold’s colony. The same is true of the debates about conditions in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. It was the British press (particularly Henry Nevinson) that kept alive the discussion of slavery in Portuguese West Africa.⁷ More contemporary examples of this bias toward national interest include the U.S. media coverage of the Iraq War or the different national responses to the documents revealed by WikiLeaks. These are just two examples of the many different ways that national media frame global news events for their domestic audiences.

The Line Between Advocacy and Journalism

Just like today’s journalists, the journalists of one hundred years ago relied on information from documents, firsthand experience, and from being on the scene, interviewing witnesses and, in some cases, advocates and campaigners. Often the news trickled down from academics or lawyers who later faded into the background as the media ran with the story. In other cases, the journalists more explicitly crossed the line into advocacy—again, as many do today.

Many publishers dream of a world in which media houses would be financially strong, independent, and able to carry out investigations without help. In reality, investigative journalism is often underwritten by foundations and philanthropists. So too in the past. As many of the essays in the book discuss, advocacy organizations and NGOs gave information to reporters and worked closely with them as they developed their stories. In this sense the missionaries who printed pamphlets and ran campaigns and worked with journalists are perhaps the forerunners of today’s human rights campaigners.

The exposé in this book of Nestlé’s infant food formula marketing practices demonstrates these close ties. Pieces on the subject, written by the same person, were published both by the media and by an influential NGO. Author Mike Muller was a card-carrying member of Britain’s National Union of Journalists when he wrote the first big report on the Nestlé’s baby milk scandal (published by War on Want) as well as a 1974 article for New Scientist that was critical of the baby food industry. As his piece in this book makes clear, Muller thinks of himself as an activist and that the journalism was critical to the campaign. There had been complaints for decades about the use of infant food formula, including a speech made in 1939 in Singapore by a renowned scientist who specialized in infant diseases,⁸ but it was not until the 1970s that the consumer boycott spread and new codes of conduct were introduced.

Labor stories too were often based on reporting done by advocacy organizations that helped journalists with data and contacts that reporters followed up on. The pieces you’ll read here about the sweatshops run by subcontractors to clothing and shoe manufacturers Nike and Kathie Lee Gifford are examples of this kind of reporting.

Another kind of story was the testimonial by the policeman or soldier who had blood on his hands and wanted to confess. Ernesto Semán introduces a piece by the famous Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, who interviewed Adolfo Scilingo, the naval officer who pushed Argentine dissidents out of helicopters during that country’s military dictatorship. Similarly, Anton Harber introduces a piece from the Weekly Mail in South Africa, a small alternative paper that ran a confession by Albert Nofemela, who admitted to having been part of a police hit squad aimed at antiapartheid activists.

Beyond the Fold

Some of the forms of journalism that existed in the nineteenth century will seem unfamiliar today. But others will seem similar: the importance of pamphlets has long since receded but blogs have replaced them. Just as happens today, stories were turned into books and ended up having a longer shelf life and more impact than they would have had as an ephemeral newspaper article. Red Rubber, E.D. Morel’s book that exposed the brutal conditions in King Leopold’s Congo, is just one example. But there are others, such as Os Sertões, the rambling and intense chronicle of Brazil’s military expansion into the hinterland that was written by Euclides da Cunha.

The Power of Print

It’s a pleasure to read the pieces in this book and important to understand the historical context in which they appeared. There are also larger questions as to why ideas spread at certain times. A vast amount of scholarship exists on this subject generally, but my focus is the journalism. Why does something become news? Trafficking of people, hunger, foot binding, exploitative labor conditions, military and police atrocities have gone on for centuries. So what suddenly makes them a story, to be read about and sometimes acted upon? What conditions impel journalists to explore a topic, and why does it resonate, or not?

Stories Didn’t Always Spread

Language, political control, and technological barriers were bigger blocks to the spread of news in the past than they are today. Newspapers often covered what was of interest in their region or country while—even after the invention of the telegraph—news from remote places overseas took weeks or months to arrive. The rise of the Internet, social media, and citizen journalism has changed all that. News does indeed travel faster now, even if it is often ignored when it arrives.

When Do Campaigns Happen?

Although many stories often didn’t spread, didn’t go global, or were just shrugged off by their readers, they sometimes did catch fire. In their book Activists Beyond Borders, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink compare successful campaigns, such as those by the missionaries against foot binding in China, with campaigns around the same time that didn’t do much, such as the missionary-led campaign against female genital mutilation in Kenya. Journalism, on its own, could not bring about change. There needed to be local support and local elites ready to transform their societies. (Understanding why that might be so would take us well beyond this book.) Today we refer to the importance of media ecologies and information ecosystems, expressions that imply many things need to happen in order for one advocacy campaign or series of articles to have an effect. In today’s world, the barriers to entry for news creation and dissemination are low, but audience fragmentation makes it hard to get a sustained and regular following.

This may mean that sociologist Clifford Bob’s ideas about the marketing of causes are even more relevant. Successful activists in developing countries understand that mounting a global campaign requires forming connections with Western organizations that will support them and promote their cause. Having a spokesman who is media savvy, has lived in the West, and speaks English helps, says Bob, who cites Aung San Suu Kyi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the Dalai Lama as examples. In his introduction to a piece by Nigeria’s Ken Saro-Wiwa, Bob explains the way Saro-Wiwa, who was originally preoccupied with the independence of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta, broadened his campaign so that it appealed to global environmental activists.

Economist Alexander Dyck has written about how sensitive companies are to reputational effects.⁹ The example of Benjamin Skinner’s reporting about the terrible conditions on the fishing boats in chapter 9 is a case in point. These boats were chartered to New Zealand, the owners and officers were largely Korean, and the sailors were Indonesian. But New Zealand turned out to be responsive to the name and shame effect, and so were the large American companies that bought the fish.

The impact of the story and research was tremendous, and New Zealand’s law was rewritten within months. That story was based on the research of a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland Business School who got the story out through a journalist who was then able to get space for it in Bloomberg Businessweek, demonstrating yet again the importance of amplification and the fact that traditional media outlets with strong brand names may have the influence that many of the disparate websites of the twenty-first century, with their fragmented readership and weak finances, often don’t.

All in the Timing

Timing is also critical. As Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism professor Sheila Coronel notes, the flowering of exposure reporting is often accompanied by periods of political transition. There are different kinds of transitions that can produce investigative journalism. Countries in transition to democracy generally see a large increase in the number of media outlets (think Spain after Franco, France after World War II, Indonesia after Suharto, Burma in 2013, Ghana after Jerry Rawlings left office in 2001). Periods of political tension and rivalry between factions in power can lead to leaks that make news.

The presence of larger social movements also may enhance the likelihood of journalistic campaigns being successful. This is illustrated here in the chapter by historian Jayeeta Sharma, who describes the connections between the activists who worked on the coolie problem and Brahmo Samaj, which she characterizes as an important modernizing sect that sought to reform Hindu social practices across India.

The anticolonial journalism in this book is another example: many anticolonialist fighters knew how to use the power of the press. But the writings of the anticolonialist journalists were particularly effective because they came at a period when there were vast upheavals in the French and British colonies and widespread political movements calling for independence following World War II.

Of course, for these larger social movements to exist, there has to be a climate in which they are permitted. As historian Philippe Peycam describes in his introduction to a piece by Vietnamese anticolonial writer Nguy n An Ninh, the French allowed the Vietnamese to open newspapers because the French wanted support from an educated, urban middle class. This turned out to be a mistake for the French colonialists as the new, educated urban elites used their newspapers to call for freedom from the French.

This book is full of those spaces in which journalism crept in and then soared. Even under oppressive regimes such as those in Pinochet’s Chile, China, and Vietnam, some journalists were able to push the limits and publish. Sometimes it was economic or environmental stories, as these have often been allowed when other kinds of exposure reporting was not. When there was an opening in society, or a responsive government, or a company that was worried about its reputation, the journalism could catch on and have an effect. Sometimes it took a reporter abroad to write the first big piece, after which it would amplify and reverberate back to the country where the event took place but, because of government or other kinds of censorship, could not be reported on.

Financial Problems

Another point in common with today is that after the first wave of excitement during political transitions, most media outlets don’t survive financially. In fact, many of the hard-hitting newspapers of the last decade, such as Taraf in Turkey or Next in Nigeria, ran into economic problems.

One thing that has not changed over the last hundred-plus years is that there is not much of a market for investigative reporting. Periods like the Progressive era in the United States, from 1900 to 1905, when there was lots of revenue to fund the muckraking magazines, is the exception, not the rule. Generally, advertising is hard to come by, subscriptions rarely provide enough revenue, and even the most deep-pocketed proprietor soon tires of the pressure and extensive lawsuits that accompany seriously independent and critical reporting. The drive to maximize profits can also hurt good journalism, as sensationalism sells. Without an audience for serious reporting, the media are forced to dumb down their coverage in order to make money.¹⁰

This problem has become particularly salient today in the era of the Internet. For decades newspaper advertising helped fund investigative reporting—an unlikely marriage that seemed to work. The Internet has thrived on blogging and opinion and on citizen reporting—typically not based on expensive investigative reporting—and aggregating, taking stories produced elsewhere. While it may have enhanced the dissemination of knowledge that has already been produced, it has yet to develop a business model that would support extensive investigative reporting on new subjects. As advertising has shifted to Internet sites like Google and Facebook and away from the media, there is hope that these companies will use their revenues to finance the kind of reporting featured in this book.¹¹ It’s not clear how much the West Coast tech companies will contribute in the future, but they have already influenced philanthropy in the media sector by helping spur the fashion for metrics and hard data that demonstrate the impact of journalism.¹²

Measuring Impact

The foundations that increasingly fund exposure journalism are, like other media development donors, under pressure to demonstrate impact and to find ways to quantitatively measure outcomes. Donors want results and try constantly to figure out how to gauge the impact of the money they give. They hope that ever more sophisticated technology and data will be able to provide information as to what concrete results are achieved by in-depth reporting. Journalists, squeezed by these demands, scramble to find ways to prove their worth.

This book takes a longer view and, as such, is hopeful but not fully conclusive. I’ve outlined here some of the circumstances in which exposure reporting and campaigning works. It’s also known under what circumstances media usually won’t be able to perform the watchdog function very effectively: repression that is as tight as Stalin’s Russia, controls that are rigorous and well enforced, and proprietors aligned with business interests who squash investigative journalism and use their outlets to support their friends in government or their own business interests.

In taking the longer view, this book provides an important note of caution to those who seek large and immediate impact. It’s clear that journalism is only part of a bigger picture. But when the circumstances are right, journalism does make a difference. For example, stories read by policy makers can spur them to action. Journalism can also help influence societal changes that ensure that circumstances are right, that there is an openness to critiques identifying societal abuses of the kind this collection of articles exemplifies. Some of these societal changes occur slowly. But stories—written over and over again, over a span of years, sometimes decades—can sometimes have a cumulative effect. In part this is because by framing an event in a certain way the media can change how society looks at it. The case of Nike is an example: over years the way the media portrayed the problem of labor conditions in the factories changed.¹³ As the media coverage became more sophisticated, so did our understanding of the problems and how to address them. I believe the world is better today as a result of the investigative reporting of the kind contained in much of this book. And this is so even if it’s also clear that the same kinds of problems reappear, sometimes over and over again, and are written about over a span of decades.

Selection of Articles

Researching this book, I found that the same kinds of stories kept reappearing across countries and across time: slavery and trafficking; the brutality of labor conditions; human rights violations committed by the military; rural poverty and the difficult conditions of rural areas, often faced by women; corruption; and environmental and natural disasters that exposed the weakness of government. This book seeks to reflect these themes, but it should be clear that this book is in no way comprehensive. There are many stories and many journalists that I did not include. Still, it is remarkable that such a large fraction of global muckraking is reflected in the kinds of stories represented here.

In making choices, I usually went for the readable, the significant, or the compelling. I eschewed stories that didn’t travel, no matter how important they were, or which were reported over such a long period in such small increments that they didn’t make sense for the outside reader. I favored reporting by journalists in the global south and I focused on the subjects that they covered (including mining and oil, life in the countryside, and anticolonialism). Because of space reasons, we had to cut