Every year on 9 December, people of integrity mark International Anti-Corruption Day. Investigative reporters are among the most committed anti-corruption fighters and often among those who make an impact in the fight against corruption. Traditionally, in the context of 9 December, Ziarul de Gardă launched an exhibition highlighting the year’s corruption cases, the efforts of investigative journalists, and the impact of their work.

This year, ZdG organised an exhibition event at Artcor, where several dozen exhibits were on display and guests of the event were given a guided tour. Visitors to the exhibition included ambassadors, activists, journalists, and representatives of state institutions involved in the fight against corruption. Later, the exhibition participants were joined by President Maia Sandu, accompanied by the already famous dog Codruț.

What are the costs, losses, and gains for reporters involved in the fight against corruption? Who is with them and who is attacking them? What do the battles and impact look like? What do you gain from their fight? What’s next for all of us? This event brought some of the answers to these questions to the surface, but also generated reflections.

The title of this year’s exhibition is “Reflection of Corruption” and it has been inscribed on mirrors to show us all that in a state where corruption exists no one can feel fully clean – a reflection of this phenomenon will follow us everywhere and affect our image. The urge is to connect all of us to the effort to fight corruption, not to leave it to reporters, activists, or state institutions, because in a state of integrity all citizens feel good.

The exhibits reveal the state of an investigative newsroom: hard work, digital or verbal attacks, financial or psychological crises, but also the impact of investigations, which sometimes exceeds expectations, and sometimes – despite all the effort – is missing.

What do investigative journalists want?

In December we asked several investigative newsrooms to answer a questionnaire – to find out what the common challenges are. The answers also reflect the state of affairs in the ZdG newsroom: the lack of staff, the difficulty of getting information, the lack of institutional response to journalists’ disclosures. At the same time, the reporters consider their work relevant not only because it informs citizens about what is happening to public goods, but also prompts politicians and dignitaries to work to solve these problems.

Kent D. Logsdon, US Ambassador to Moldova, confirmed the journalists’ expectations, saying that “the press has a key role to play in holding governments and people in influential positions around the world, including in Moldova, accountable. You are truly the guardians of the truth. Like people across the country, my colleagues and I rely on your coverage of events in Moldova and the region to inform our work.”

Infusions, emergencies and salt in the wound

The exhibition also brought to the fore the efforts of investigative journalists. At ZdG we have several colleagues who follow non-stop what is happening in the justice system, in the legislative field, in the work of public authorities dealing with corruption, poverty, abuses, but also how these problems are combated. While colleagues dedicated to investigative or social reporting work in the field, news colleagues are like an infusion of the necessary news by the minute into the news arteries.

The situation for the other journalists in the newsroom isn’t any easier. Investigative reporters are constantly threatened, verbally assaulted, intimidated, and interviews with corrupt individuals are downright challenging – reporters often have the door slammed in their faces, and the most common response is “No!” And access to information often remains a challenge. At the same time, investigative newsrooms face many digital challenges, DDoS attacks, identity and digital content theft, anonymous threats on social networks.  

Jānis Mažeiks, Ambassador of the European Union to Moldova, present at the event, said that “journalists play a very important role in the fight against corruption, in the sense that it is often responsible journalists who are the first to draw attention to problems that can then be brought to light by law enforcement agencies.”

Other people’s perceptions of investigative journalism are equally important, but sometimes seem distorted. For example, this year’s survey of judges, prosecutors and lawyers’ ”perceptions of justice and corruptionˮ shows that 89% of judges and 88% of prosecutors believe that low levels of trust in justice are also caused by the unjustified image created by the media.

Visitors to the exhibition saw the wounds of an investigative team and were even able to sprinkle a little extra salt. For investigative journalists, salt on the wound is commonplace. Especially when the newsroom is faced with avalanches of requests from citizens, when there are too many corruption cases to investigate, when we have too many court cases, too many holes in the budget and not enough reporters. And after all this, you hear voices saying: “So what if you have written, you still haven’t beaten corruption. You wrote and everyone forgot. You investigate, but the corrupt don’t go to jail.” The inefficiency of others hurts.

ZdG readers – champions of transparency

President Maia Sandu, present at the event, stressed the importance of access to information for investigative journalists. “We have been making efforts, and we will continue to do so, because we know there is a need, to ensure more transparency. Probably, in some institutions we need to hire some more people so that the answers come in time. Some information, I think, we can make accessible, where possible, through information technologies, but first of all we have to make sure that everybody respects the law and the information that by law must be made public, must be accessible to journalists.”

The newsroom has displayed a number of hand-written letters from readers in the villages reporting cases of corruption and injustice. We have a whole library of letters that come in every week. People have learnt to fight with ZdG and encourage the newsroom to fight harder. People often believe in ZdG more than in other institutions. The letters come, after all, from subscribers to ZdG’s print edition – 88% of our subscribers are pensioners and vulnerable people.

his year, the 19th since the ZdG print edition appeared, we have a new uncertainty at work: on 30 November 2023, the Moldovan Post Office announced that the delivery tariff for print had increased by 341%. An exhibit shows how this news hit us: like a hammer over the mailbox.

However, the work of an investigative newsroom also brings change to society. Remember last year’s famous story when 4 reporters worked undercover to expose how Shor’s protesters are being bought? The life of that investigation continued tumultuously into 2023, when many foreign journalists quoted from that story in the international press, and the Moldovan authorities did not ignore it either. ZdG’s investigation into the protesters paid by Shor also reached the Constitutional Court in the case of the banning of his party. Shor’s money, framed in gold, was presented at the exhibition as a testament to the success of these reporters.

One of the favourite exhibits was the bottle of magic powder. Sometimes ZdG reporters just phone institutions or visit a locality and already change is happening. This happened in a locality in the Cimișlia district – after the ZdG reporters’ visit, people phoned and said, ”When you came, I had the impression that you brought something magical, everyone was scared.” One of the exhibits contains a bottle of glowing powder, which visitors used to create magic in the impact of investigations.

The endless battle for access to information

Mariana Rață, a TV8 journalist, stressed the need for such events: “Every time, Ziarul de Gardă is very original in these exhibitions, but the good thing is that it feels the way only investigative journalists can feel the problems that journalists who do investigative reporting face. Unfortunately, everything you have exposed here is a truth, just as we have a curtain drawn over transparency in several public institutions, and this remains a serious problem for which we must no longer hope, I say, that it will resolve itself, but must make persistent efforts to force the authorities to change the situation and help us to be better able to investigate the acts of corruption.”  

Katarina Fried, Swedish Ambassador to Moldova, present at the exhibition, highlighted the example of Sweden, one of the champion countries in transparency, integrity and anti-corruption: “In Sweden, we take freedom of information legislation very seriously. It is an obligation for everyone to make available information about anything that any public authority does.”

In the end, visitors to the exhibition confirmed that there is a category of reporters who will dig for the truth, however dangerous, difficult, and discouraging. In the most difficult conditions, these reporters will risk everything to bring people the truth. They are called investigative journalists.

In the summer of 2024, Ziarul de Gardă turns 20. In this context, the exhibition “Reflection of Corruption” will be on display in several institutions in different localities to remind people how hard investigative journalists work.

The exhibition “Reflection of Corruption” is realized by ZdG on the basis of a grant offered by the US Embassy in Chișinău. The materials in the exhibition belong to the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the US Embassy.