In the eighth of our series of events at the Frontline Club, Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, will be speaking to Rana Sabbagh a founder of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ).

Rana will discuss the challenges of working with journalists in extremely difficult circumstances around the region with Sarah Giaziri, Director of the Frontline Freelance Register, and Mark Hunter, who has worked with ARIJ to develop the ‘Story-Based Inquiry’ approach to investigative journalism.

The event will look at how ARIJ tries to build trust with audiences despite often having to publish their investigations internationally rather than in national media due to self-censorship and restrictions on press freedom.

Rana will give an inside track on how her team approaches their investigations and what she has learnt from the last 14 years of running ARIJ, through the lens of some of ARIJ’s most successful investigations.

By Mark Lee Hunter and Luk N. Van Wassenhove for the GIJN website:

"No discussion is more tiresome for journalists than the one about how no one can be truly objective. The good news is that if current trends continue, we won’t have to hear it anymore. Objectivity is morphing into a radically new form.

Our received concept of objectivity requires an ethical stance of neutrality and “fairness,” an arm’s-length, non-judgmental distance toward the sources, targets and outcomes of our work. That wasn’t how it started. As Dan Schiller showed, “objectivity” began as a justification for publishing sensational crime news in the 1840s, then supported a commercial strategy, because a partisan journal necessarily has a narrower audience than a neutral one. Even then, objectivity became a standard in American journalism only when biased and corrupt reporting became a national scandal in the 1920s. The term has lately disappeared from the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, though the ideal of fairness remains."