Yesterday I was poking around the Internet, and as I suspected, I’m upsetting some people. As cowards do, they go for your reputation. They hide and would never face you in open battle because they know they would lose. Nearly twenty years ago, I had a story, a big one, and was naive enough to believe I could publish what is in the public interest to know, and that interest would compensate for how I uncovered a sewer and those wallowing in it. Anyways, reflections on independent, undercover, investigative journalism.
Truth doesn’t arrive by invitation. It doesn’t respond to FOI requests, doesn’t submit itself to process, and doesn’t wait patiently for editorial approval. Criminal worlds don’t archive their own indictments. They don’t keep minutes. They don’t self-document. They test, they whisper, they watch to see who can stay long enough without flinching.
You learn this the hard way. You also learn something else: when you return with information the mainstream media didn’t get, didn’t want, or didn’t dare pursue, the resistance rarely comes from those exposed. It comes from the institutions whose authority rests on being the ones who know first.
There is a quiet rule in modern journalism: information is acceptable only if it preserves the hierarchy that delivers it. Truth is welcome so long as it arrives through the correct door, stamped, sourced, and legible to the lawyers. If it doesn’t, if it comes back on your clothes, smelling of proximity and time, it is treated as suspect — regardless of how accurate it is.
This is why the great uncomfortable cases never quite settle. William Thomas Stead buying a child to prove that children could be bought. A Danish journalist embedding himself for years inside a pedophile network, not skimming the edges but inhabiting the logic, the language, the self-justifications. These weren’t just exposés of abuse. They were exposures of method. They demonstrated that some truths do not reveal themselves to distance or decorum. They require endurance, ambiguity, and moral risk.
And that is what Europe and then the West recoiled from.
The Danish case, in particular, ended a certain kind of innocence in Western journalism. Not because the reporting failed, but because it succeeded too completely. It showed, beyond argument, that proximity yields knowledge — and that knowledge cannot be neatly separated from the means by which it is obtained. Courts and editors were forced to confront a question they preferred not to ask: what happens when a journalist does what institutions cannot, or will not, do themselves?
The response was not philosophical. It was structural. Newsrooms tightened rules. Editors demanded exit strategies before entry. Lawyers entered pitch meetings. Undercover work was not outlawed, but it was shortened, supervised, and sanitised. Public interest stopped functioning as moral exemption. In effect, the West decided it would rather risk ignorance than tolerate uncontrolled knowledge.
This shift coincided neatly with the rise of FOI culture and data journalism. Documents are clean. Databases can be audited. Records can be verified, litigated, archived. But entire criminal worlds operate precisely where records do not exist. Abuse networks do not keep files. Corruption does not invoice itself honestly. The deeper you go, the less paper there is.
FOI is a powerful tool — against governments that fear audit, against institutions that leave trails. It is useless against silence, against trust-based criminal intimacy, against cultures that communicate in implication rather than text. You don’t submit a request to enter those spaces. You are admitted, or you are not.
And when you are admitted, the cost is permanent. You don’t unsee it. You don’t age out of it. There is no resolution, no clean ending, no moment where the knowledge politely stands down. It follows you forward in time, because knowledge accumulates. Ignorance expires; knowledge does not.
So you end up in a strange position. Mistrusted by those you exposed. Resented by those who claim to expose. Too compromised for the clean rooms, too honest for the press release. Accused, inevitably, of complicity — usually by people who never went near the fire and are deeply concerned about the smell of smoke.
What the Danish case finally clarified was that journalists who go where documentation does not exist will not be protected — not by courts, not by employers, not by the profession’s own mythology. Once that became clear, only institutions with extraordinary backing, or individuals willing to absorb lasting damage, continued the work. The rest learned to look away politely.
This is the quiet bargain modern journalism has made with itself: we will report what can be proven without contamination, and leave the rest to law enforcement. Each side pretends this boundary is natural, rather than convenient.
The cost of that bargain is hard to measure, because what disappears is not stories, but possibilities. Truths that require years rather than cycles. Trust rather than access. Facts that only surface after you’ve been tested and found willing to stay.
History doesn’t remember who followed procedure. It remembers who returned with realities everyone else insisted could not be proven — until they were.
Below is Edward Murrow’s report on Buchenwald. This is proximity, powerful, factual journalism. And yet, eighty years later, it happens again, and we are called criminals for raising our voices against it.
Update on the proposed hate speech laws here in New South Wales.
It looks as though the government has dropped insisting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as hate speech. Because it isn’t, a point I made a few posts ago, and I’m confident many others did as well. So, they have come up with another one, “Globalise the Intifada.” In the two years I’ve been going to pro-Palestinian demos, I have never once heard anyone calling for “Globalise the Intifada.” It’s something made up to get the law passed. Intifada in Arabic means “resistance,” so translated, it becomes “Global Resistance.” Resistance can be demonstrations, boycotts, trade sanctions, or things more likely to upset the Israelis than a 6-year-old hurling little stones at a tank. They know how to handle stone-throwing children: brutal arrest, no legal representation, trial in a military rather than a juvenile court, open-ended detention purposely designed to be hell on Earth.
The so-called ‘hate speech’ legislation passed the State’s Lower House last night and will most certainly pass the Upper House later today, becoming law. Three organisations claim the laws are unconstitutional and are mounting a constitutional challenge. Those mounting the challenge include Palestinian Action Group Sydney, the Council of Australian Jewry, and Jews Against the Occupation. Let’s hope it succeeds.