#CourageON: Help us investigate the crooks

Last week, the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) called a press conference to respond to our reportage on abandoned Filipino seafarers. They promised to build stronger relations with flag states to protect Filipinos at risk of abandonment on flag of convenience ships.

It was one of my better days as an investigative reporter. Not only were people willing to speak, people in power responded swiftly to the issues we raised.

But such days are rare. I can spend months following leads that reach a dead end. It gets even more frustrating when I know the issue to be true yet proof is so well hidden.

An example is our investigation into top officials with private interests who spoiled efforts to track and regulate greedy big fishers. It took a lot of strategizing to get some pertinent documents, and months of social media sleuthing, to connect the dots. After we published it, I was told, “We’ve known that for some time.” That made me realize that bad things indeed happen when good people do nothing.

LOSING GROUND. Interviewing fisherman Rogelio Guevarra from Navotas for the story on municipal fishers losing their fishing grounds to big operators.

I never want to do just nothing, but I cannot always do just anything. 

Hello, I am Lian Buan, and I became a journalist 14 years ago when I was 20 and thought that social media would democratize information. I am now 34 years old, an investigative reporter who’s scared that our roles have been diminished, as our jobs got tougher.

For one, there’s no more freedom in Freedom of Information (FOI). The previous Duterte government killed FOI by practice. The Marcos government killed it by policy through Presidential Memorandum Circular (PMC) No. 15, which institutionalizes a laundry list of exemptions to FOI.

Last year, I was given a six-month runaround by the Philippine National Police when I tried to get a progress report on their drug war reinvestigation. A much-hyped reinvestigation, it promised the world it was proof that local justice was working for the thousands of killings in the drug war. 

We eventually published our findings, the first public database of its kind, showing that most of the cases were closed without criminal action. When former president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested on Tuesday, March 11, and cried that he would only subject himself to a Filipino judge – I did not buy any of it. I have seen the unwillingness and inability of our justice system to hold people accountable for the drug war, much less a former head of state.

Part and parcel of that impunity was the death of transparency under Duterte and then President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Even the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) was kept out of loop because of the FOI exemptions.

Well-meaning sources would provide leads, but for understandable reasons would withhold documents. “That’s public record anyway, right?” they’d ask. 

What public record? Even public hearings and trials are no longer automatically accessible to the press! We have been cut off  from getting SALNs (Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth); courts and prosecutors have the unimpeded discretion to give us only the resolutions they want us to see; and audit reports are uploaded very late — if at all.

It seems there is no incentive for an agency to be transparent.

TOUGHER TIMES. Covering the elections during the pandemic.

Yet, I was able to pursue and publish my recent investigations into POGOs (Philippine offshore gaming operators). That’s because of sources whose trust we have earned over many years. Earning such trust requires talking to lots of people, even when those meetings are unproductive, and even when some people are deliberately put in our path to divert us. One key to killing an investigative story is to tire the reporter out — mislead her, make her wait, make her frustrated. So she just gives up.

Sometimes it’s easier to give up, but I believe that Filipinos deserve to know the other investigative stories in my draft — many in its bare bones, just waiting for a breakthrough. 

That breakthrough could be you. 

Investigative journalism requires money for tools, training, endless field work, and security. 

A DAY IN COURT. Reporting from the International Criminal Court in 2023.

Investigative journalism requires community — for sources to be protected when they work with the news media, and for those in power to look at critical reporting as a push to do better and not an enemy to suppress. 

I ask you to join the vibrant community of Rappler + subscribers.

– Rappler.com