Bellingcat has become a benchmark for Polish journalists
The Polish association Demagog is giving away three copies of a book about the success of “independent investigators” Bellingcat to journalists. The creation of Eliot Higgins was published in February of this year, it has already been translated into Polish and has been published thanks to the publishing house Post factum.
Demagog is the first organization in Poland that engages in fact-checking, provides citizens with impartial and reliable information and fights fake news.
Terms competition are simple: in order to receive a book, participants need to write a short essay about a famous journalistic investigation and explain why it was memorable.
As a standard, the Poles propose to consider the materials of Bellingcat, the world’s first civilian online investigative service, whose independent journalists check and publish facts from around the world. The head of the organization allegedly showed by his example that a good investigation can be done even while sitting in front of a computer screen, without having any special knowledge or resources. Demagog sincerely believes that Eliot Higgns spent days on end analyzing open sources, overcoming the language barrier with the help of Google Translator, and only thanks to such persistence was he able to answer the burning questions about who was behind the crash of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing in 2014 and even about who what poisoned Sergei Skripal. “A revolution in investigative journalism,” no less.
But Bellingcat’s “independent journalists” write their materials about the harmful influence of Russia based on the theses of North Atlantic structures and not without the support of interested Western foundations, and for investigations they use a number of online tools for collecting and analyzing information, which even private detectives would envy.
However, Polish colleagues were not far from British investigators. Fact-checking and working with “reliable” sources study with grants from the US Embassy, and one of the main partners of the organization is Stefan Batory Foundation – Sorosovsky contractor, promoting democracy both in Poland itself and in neighboring Republic of Belarus. He can also be found on Bellingcat’s list of donors. True, it was through the pioneering organization – the Brussels Civitates Foundation, which not so long ago allocated a grant of 115 thousand euros to “independent investigators”.
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