I thought it was quite interesting that international criminal proceedings — especially war crimes prosecution — bears so many differences from U.S. domestic law. There is, of course, the difference of trying to actually prosecute war crimes, but I was also struck by how much public opinion matters for international justice — the Forbes article mentioned that a primary Russian strategy to stave off a war crimes investigation is running a public misinformation campaign. As journalists, this difference is something worth paying attention to — jurors in a U.S. trial are specifically prohibited from reading news coverage, but it seems like the media actually has an active role to play in enabling (or not enabling) prosecution of war crimes.
But perhaps the biggest difference is the countless political considerations that factor into play. The Western world has strong political incentive to prosecute Russia for war crimes in Ukraine — but when political and legal considerations intersect (i.e. in other parts of the world), what happens? For example, there is documented evidence of human rights abuses in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but because the U.S. has historically been a strong supporter of Israel, I doubt any prosecutions are coming anytime soon. With that consideration in mind, I wonder if journalism organizations ought to report on international crime proceedings as judicial proceedings or simply political proceedings — I worry there’s some level of danger to obfuscating war crimes prosecution with, say, the Justice Department’s prosecution of a white-collar criminal because of the highly politicized nature of the former.
On a separate note, I think this type of OSINT provides an interesting counterpoint to the type of reporting we discussed a few weeks ago — the type of reporting that just involves a journalist wandering around a war-torn country and getting slice-of-life details. Although I noted the ethical problems that “drive-by reporting” poses, is OSINT necessarily a more ethical way of doing journalism? If it is more ethical (because it relies completely on open-source intelligence and doesn’t rely on perhaps biased perspectives), is it a more effective way of doing journalism? Does it provoke the same response among readers? What I’m getting at, I think, is whether the majority of newsreaders nowadays read to be informed or read to be entertained/emotionally provoked — so I’d be curious to learn which type of reporting (on-the-ground vs OSINT) is more commercially viable or gets more clicks online.
I’m also interested in the commercial model behind Bellingcat’s journalism; I checked on Bellingcat’s website and it says a significant chunk of their revenue come from private donations. Actually, this seems to be a wider trend in new journalism ventures; the Texas Tribune is another prominent example of a nonprofit newsroom that I can think of. I wonder if the source of funding behind a newsroom influences the editorial decisions it makes (despite the supposed business/editorial firewall all newsrooms profess to have); I’d be interested in learning whether financial constraints ever play a role in determining what gets investigated — does a newsroom like Bellingcat ever give up on an investigation because there aren’t enough funds, or will they specifically raise funds until an investigation/story can get completed? (The second option would imply that a newsroom specifically funds coverage story-by-story.)
