Author: Miriam Waldvogel (Page 2 of 2)

I’m interested in reporting on Israelis who have moved to Germany after October 7, perhaps claiming German citizenship in the process. There have been several major changes to German citizenship law in the past five years, including allowing for dual citizenship last summer. Germany also has a pathway to citizenship for Jews who are descended from victims of the Holocaust, a provision that was significantly expanded in 2021. Now, there’s reporting suggesting that a growing number of Israelis are interested in leaving Israel, particularly those on the left. Germany’s ambassador to Israel told Haaretz last week that “it’s not a coincidence” that more and more Israelis are moving abroad. Haaretz has also reported that the number of Israelis applying for German citizenship had dramatically spiked in the first six months of 2024 (and there’s interesting angles about families of hostages being expedited for German citizenship, even though they plan to stay in Israel).

In Berlin, I plan to focus on Israelis who have moved for political reasons. I’m interested in how they’ve integrated themselves into the city’s culture, and how they think through their decision (and ability) to immigrate while lawmakers are looking to narrow other avenues to citizenship. In April, Germany eliminated a pathway to citizenship where applicants could obtain a German passport with just three years of German residence. On the macro level, I’ll also be pursuing government data to help quantify this phenomenon post-October 7; Israelis moving to Germany has long been a fascination of a small group of academic researchers, but it’s not clear how significantly demand has spike. My sense is that it’s significant.

I’ll be speaking to researchers at the DeZIM institute, a think tank studying migration that is in the middle of a study of cultural assimilation in Berlin’s Jewish population. I’m hopeful to find a neighborhood, or even just a block, where high concentrations of Israeli immigrants have settled. I’m also in the process of reaching out to Israeli activists in Berlin who have been outspoken about Gaza as potential central characters.

One other dimension that needs to be fleshed out is Israeli tech workers and startup founders. As Israel’s international reputation flounders, do they have an easier time acquiring seed funding or contracts if they’re based in Germany or another Western European country? I may start with talking to Bard students in Berlin. but do not yet have a plan beyond that.

Perhaps naturally, I’m interested in asking the AfD about Jewish citizenship and Jewish voters. Do they want Jewish Israelis in the tent? Do they consider them “German”? Are they committed to preserving this pathway even as they look to curb citizenship opportunities for people from other countries?

OSINT is amazing. It enables truly jaw-dropping findings, from the Yale HRL’s work on Ukrainian children to Bellingcat’s investigation of the Malaysian Airlines flight. That OSINT, in theory, can be conducted by anyone, anywhere, is additionally amazing. However, I wonder if journalists have been a little too forthcoming with the techniques they’ve used to uncover airstrikes and human rights abuses. The director of Yale HRL, for instance, told me that their team started with social media posts from Russians, who were posting geotagged photos of children from what appeared to be re-education facilities. The team could then cross-reference those locations with satellite imagery, Russian property records, and other materials to determine with reasonably high likelihood that they were hosting kidnapped Ukrainian children. But what if the Russians had realized that their posts could be used as material in OSINT and turned their location tagging off? Maybe the investigation wouldn’t be dead in the water, but it would be much harder. I agree journalists should show their work, and the transparency in OSINT is important to shoring up trust in the reporting. But how much disclosure is too much? How could it inhibit future investigations?

OSINT benefits from many of the creepiest aspects of 21-century online surveillance. In 2020, for example, Bellingcat had an amazing investigation tracking the men who attempted to poison Alexei Navalny. They did so in part using cell phone and geolocation records that had been purchased from Russia’s open data market, in some instances for shockingly low prices. I’m not rubbed the wrong way behind this because there was a compelling and newsworthy reason to stalk these people, and Bellingcat was not obtaining the data via any particularly untoward means (for Russia’s standards, anyway). Still, I think it’s an interesting question to consider as these organizations convey to readers that they should be trusted.

I also think we should be careful jumping to the assertion that OSINT is truly accessible to everyone. Even if you’re an independent person not tied to a particular institution, you still have skills, connections, and expertise that most ordinary people would not have (in addition to time). Regular citizens are involved insofar as anyone can contribute video, audio, or other material to be used by an OSINT expert; I think about this Missouri man on Twitter who posted a photo of B2 bombers flying east in the hours before the US bombed Iran this summer. Is that any different from how journalism has been carried out? Ordinary people have always contributed stories, tips, perspective, and other insights that are then analyzed and narrativized by professional journalists. The Internet has just made things more accessible now.

Russia’s network of forcible re-education and militarization sites for Ukrainian children from occupied territory is far more extensive than previously known, Yale University researchers said in a report released last week.

War crimes investigators with the university’s Humanitarian Research Lab have identified 210 sites in Russia and occupied Ukraine that they say have housed Ukrainian children for military training, pro-Kremlin education, and other efforts aimed at assimilating them into Russian culture.

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian government has identified at least 20,000 children from occupied territories that have been forcibly taken to Russia, some of them eventually placed with Russian families and given Russian citizenship. Some aid groups estimate that the actual number is far higher. 

The network of facilities, the Yale researchers said, spans summer camps, orphanages, universities, military schools, and at least one religious site. In addition to finding nearly double the number of locations they expected, said the lab’s director, Nathaniel Raymond, they were also surprised by the scope of militarization activities.

“To be able to visually see from 450 miles above the Earth’s surface that they are training kids at gun ranges and in trench fortifications that directly resemble the front-line fortifications we see at this stage in the Ukraine war was truly chilling,” Raymond said.

Maria Zakharova, a Russian government spokesperson, denied the Yale report as “fake fabrications” on Thursday.

“No one bothers to provide any facts and no one bears any responsibility,” she said at a press conference.

The investigators from the Humanitarian Research Lab relied on satellite imagery, Russian social media posts, government announcements, and other publicly available, open-source information to identify re-education facilities — including Russian government property data that showed it owned about half of the sites in question. Around one-quarter of the 210 sites had been identified in previous investigations.

Around 62 percent of locations hosted re-education activity for Ukrainian children, including history lectures, museum visits, and programming focused on Russian patriotic themes. Additionally, children underwent some form of military training or militarization at nearly 40 facilities; in one case, children at a site run by Russia’s Ministry of Education assembled drones, mine detectors, robots, and other military equipment.

The findings have some limitations. The Yale researchers could not determine the number of Ukrainian children located at the facilities, nor whether they were still being held. They also cautioned that the actual number of sites could be much higher.

Still, the report is significant for identifying the locations of so many re-education centers and tying them directly to the Russian government, said Vladyslav Havrylov, a Ukrainian historian and a fellow with the Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues at Georgetown University.

“It’s once more strong evidence that in high level of Russian governors, they know about forcible deportation from occupied territories, they support this policy, they want to re-education and militarize the children,” he said. “It’s a planned policy from [the] Russian Federation.”

“We try to force force them to live with the reality that now the majority of the camps locations are known,” Raymond said. “That’s because they’re trying to muddle the numbers as part of the negotiations, to make it harder for the Ukrainians to specifically hold them to definite individuals, definite overall cohort numbers, and access requests to specific locations.”

However, the Humanitarian Research Lab’s future is uncertain after it lost its federal funding due to Trump administration cuts in March. The lab has since kept running on private donations, Raymond said.

The issue of Ukrainian children has generated international outrage and is one of few aspects of the war with bipartisan agreement in Congress. In the days after the Yale lab’s new report, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Amy Klobuchar, a Republican and a Democrat, took to Fox News to re-up calls for unconditionally returning Ukrainian children before any peace agreement with Russia is finalized.

One thing that struck me in Ben Taub’s reporting was the use of OSINT and internet data to track otherwise secretive figures like Halabi. CIJA investigators, for instance, found his Facebook accounts and tracked his location via pings on his Skype profile. My favorite detail was when Taub found his Whatsapp profile, with a photo of the man himself on a bridge somewhere in Hungary. I’m continually surprised by the information that be gleaned simply from carefully looking at public data with some amount of patience. In my news story, I cover a new report from a lab at Yale that tracks Ukrainian children who have been forcibly deported to and re-educated in Russia. The lab’s work often starts with social media posts, the lab’s director told me. Russian officers at a repurposed summer camp or military base might snap a photo with Ukrainian children and post it (publicly) to Telegram, Twitter, or Facebook, seemingly unaware that it has been geotagged. Investigators can also confirm activities relevant to Russification through posts or even satellite images.

Taub’s reporting clearly blends in-depth reporting alongside extensive documents, such as the hundreds of Syrian government records collected by CIJA that were seized by rebels during the civil war. But in some ways, the narrative feels a little too dry and clinical, nicely lifting from the transcript of an asylum interview without further color. Taub’s best moments were clear scenes, of him mocking on Oliver Lang’s old apartment door or of Lang’s personality-filled texts to his boss. Patrick Kingsley’s reporting, in contrast, manages to meld extensive, quoted interviews — although there are clearly parts that are more fuzzy around the edges — with important cues about demeanor and emotion that are sometimes more informative than the quotes themselves. I thought Mikhail’s technique of blocking out an entire story, as she does about midway through the assigned portion, was surprisingly effective. At the price of losing the specific context in which that story is being told to the writer, you earn a much more vivid and immersive depiction of her frame. This move also allows her to clearly bring out the voice of the original source — although storyteller is evidently a much better description. That’s of course not not possible with the parts of Taub’s reporting that relied heavily on documents. Sometimes, document-based stories are impactful enough on their own to deeply impact readers. More often, though, it seems that journalists should work to blend reports with human narrative, like we saw with Azmat Khan last week.

To Alex’s post: I think the Times did a great job in packaging its reporting into a varied set of products to reach the widest audience possible. While Khan’s long-form writing is a lengthy investment, both parts are split up into digestible chunks: headers, highlighted messages between U.S. army members, pictures of survivors and the aftermath of strikes. Also, legal cases and reports are boring; footnotes even more so. The Times could have chosen to overwhelm the reader with statistic after statistic, airstrike after airstrike. But for the sake of public understanding, they have to narrativize and drop less important details. That’s not a bad thing.

The Times also made several big audience engagement choices that I think go a long way towards bringing more people into their reporting. First, they released thousands of pages of documents they obtained via FOIA, allowing anyone to investigate these attacks further. I think that’s especially important in the OSINT age, where breakthroughs might depend on an everyday person who happens to take a video of something newsworthy. Their database is exhaustive, and basically anything you click on is interesting (conversely, you could also argue that the Times should not withhold documents anyway because they were obtained via public records request). Additionally, they also wrapped up this long-form reporting into a “What you need to know” story that runs through key takeaways and narrative points. Finally, they also released CENTCOM’s responses to their reporting in full, as opposed to the clipped versions that made it into the piece — so that if anyone really had doubts about the narrative, they could see the (uninspiring) rebuttal and judge for themselves.

I think this type of lengthy disclosure, where possible, is especially important for war reporting. It feels like trust in media is particularly tenuous in this realm; look to the war in Gaza as an example. As Khan well acknowledges in her writing, reporters may have to do extra work to “push back” against a prevailing national narrative about X conflict being just and Y group of people being bad. Khan should also be commended for publicly detailing her extensive methodology, another step towards shoring up trust in reporting.

This kind of detailed, in-depth reporting takes years; Khan talked to people who lost family members in 2015 for an article published in 2021. That also means there are years of coverage that did not — and could not — include her new revelations. Attaching an editor’s note pointing to Khan’s reporting on every single story about an airstrike feels ham-fisted, but how should editors think about old coverage once it becomes outdated?

I thought “A Faith Under Siege” was most interesting not for what it showed about Ukrainian Christians, but for what it showed about evangelical Americans. That there would be people with no other ties to Ukraine willing to fly to a war zone and assist people through proselytizing is especially intriguing in the modern conservative landscape (I suppose it’s also unfair of me to look at a story about people being targeted and hunted by a foreign enemy and say “oh look at those nice Americans who are coming to help! Aren’t they so much more interesting?”).

Clearly, the documentary’s producers seemed to think its religious audience was bought in to Russian propaganda about Ukraine, citing Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin and other right-wing news sources that amplify claims villifying Ukraine. However, I’m not sure whether this is actually the case. I haven’t been able to find good and recent polling on this issue, and there are some interesting counterexamples. Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, reversed his stance on a $61 billion foreign aid package to Ukraine in April 2024 that he had initially opposed. Johnson changed his mind after meeting with Ukrainian Christians who painted the war as a spiritual struggle (I would also put Johnson in a different bucket of religious Republicans than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has many other dynamics at play).

This volunteerism is an interesting slice of U.S. influence separate from the significant funding role our government plays, as Trudy Rubin documents. I’d be interested at a ballpark of how much ad-hoc support Americans offer in this vein. The New York Times ran a story on Sunday about Americans who join the Ukrainian military but couldn’t pin down a specific estimate, nor did those interviewed express any particularly religious motivations for joining. Deb’s reporting about Ukrainians who volunteer to shoot down drones and pay for it themselves was also interesting. It would not be inconceivable to see these people set up a GoFundMe and promote on social media, where anyone in the world — especially Americans — could make a contribution.

Given the reaction that religious Americans have had to the war in Ukraine, I think it’s interesting to think about the (lack of) reaction from similar groups about the war in Gaza. It’s certainly not an apples-to-apples comparison, especially with Christian Zionism — the evangelical idea that the existence of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy — at play. It’s also not clear that Israel has been systemically targeting Christian churches in the same way Russia has, although that hypothesis might be worth some investigation. But a deadly strike on a Christian church is a deadly strike in a Christian church. If Colby Barrett calls the war in Ukraine “an attack on religious freedom and believers everywhere,” what would he say about Gaza?

Edward Helmore’s assertion in The Guardian that Trump is “winning” against the U.S. media is as vague as it is wrong. Helmore points to CBS’s $16 million payment to the president — essentially a bribe to settle a sham lawsuit and allow the FCC to approve its parent company’s merger — alongside the curtailment of the opinion pages of WaPo and the LA Times by their billionaire owners. Those moves are bad and dangerous. But in addition to painting the American media with an absurdly broad brush, Helmore seems to forget that, amid the corporate turmoil at the top, American reporters have continued to do their jobs, and do them very, very well. If Trump is “winning,” he’s certainly not winning on coverage.

The reason you know about the devastating consequences of USAID’s dismantling, or that Pentagon officials recklessly use Signal to communicate classified information, or how the Trump family has been bewitched by cryptocurrency lobbyists, is because of American media — some of it corporate-owned. The Wall Street Journal — owned, along with Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch, a friend of Trump’s — has relentlessly reported on the president’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, knowing full well they would be sued the moment they published. CBS’s Jennifer Jacobs has broke story after story of turmoil in the Pentagon and the intelligence community, despite her network’s capitulation to Trump.

Helmore would do better to understand the more subtle ways that ownership influences reporting (as distinct from opinion journalism; there is a difference between setting ideological limits on a section of the paper and attempting to kill a news story entirely). Editors might be less enthusiastic to enlist lawyers for mid-level stories. Reporting jobs might be cut to improve newsrooms’ bottom line. Every now and then, a top editor might have to take some serious heat from the paper’s ownership.

If there was a documented case of a newsroom owner storming in and demanding to kill new, bombshell reporting that would shed significant light on a corner of the administration, it would ignite a firestorm among journalists. The public would know. Perhaps the closest example is Shari Redstone’s scrutiny of 60 Minutes, which is, again, very bad and troubling. But this is nowhere near Helmore’s assertion that American media is “standing near the edge of a cliff,”

I find this sort of unhelpful, even harmful hand-wringing over the state of American media to be very common in well-intentioned commentary on admittedly dangerous actions from the White House. The attacks on press freedom detailed by Just Security, for instance, make reporters’ jobs more difficult. But many of them are not fatal. Not being able to access Trump’s Oval Office sprays — where dozens of independent media remain to cover his remarks — is irrelevant to the reporter who is deeply sourced inside the White House.

I think Nancy Gibbs gets much closer to the real problem facing national media: that they lack trust and an audience across wide swaths of America. Even then, she notes, reporting from legacy outlets matters.

“The reporting that is being done by those reporters is influencing public opinion,” she says. “It is just mediated through many other people distributing their insights.”