Ukraine Crisis: 7 Reasons Why Crimea Results Aren't Credible -- And Media Coverage Stinks

Media reporting on Sunday's referendum in Crimea is a study in bad journalism.

An Associated Press story today on the results was typical. 

"Crimea Referendum: Final Results Show 97 Percent of Voters in Crimea Support Joining Russia," the title uncritically said.

Crimean electoral chief Mikhail Malyshev is quoted saying his officials hadn't gotten "a single complaint" about the vote.

The results are beyond dispute, Russian parliamentarian Valery Ryazantsev is quoted saying. 

"(There are) absolutely no reasons to consider the vote results illegitimate."

Voter turnout was supposedly 83 percent, Malyshev said in other stories.

North Korea-Style Results

The AP story was typical of much of the coverage.

Like many other stories on the vote, AP portrayed the implausible 97-percent result with no qualification. It also failed to note reports of intimidation, fraud and misinformation in Crimea that raise questions about the referendum results. 

The Wall Street Journal's similarly unqualified headline was "Ukraine Region Votes to Join Russia." Even U.S. government-run Voice of America ran with the uncritical title "Crimea Votes in Favor of Union With Russia."

In fact, the Crimean results are reminiscent of similarly absurd votes in Turkmenistan (whose president won 97 percent of votes in 2012), North Korea (where Kim Jong-un recently won 100 percent of votes) and Chechnya (where one overenthusiastic polling station made the mistake of reporting a 107-percent turnout in 2012, with all but one of the votes going to Russia's Vladimir Putin).

7 Reasons Official Results Not Credible

Here are seven reasons to suggest the Crimean referendum result is implausible -- and that we actually have no idea if most Crimeans really voted to join Russia:

1) Reports of Fraud: Russian citizens were reportedly allowed to vote in the referendum, while one person was able to vote four times, the Kyiv Post reported today.

News reports also said some referendum ballots reportedly arrived pre-marked.

Malyshev, the Crimean electoral chief, also acknowledged that deceased people may have been included on electoral lists, raising more possibility for fraud, the Kyiv Post said.

In another Kyiv Post story, a Russian journalist is quoted saying she was allowed to vote after showing a temporary one-year residency permit and disclosing to an election official that she is a Russian citizen.

"According to all the laws, this is illegal," the journalist says in this interview on YouTube describing how she managed to vote.

"I am a foreign citizen. How can I decide the destiny of the Crimean Autonomous Republic of Ukraine?" she asked, saying she "obviously questions the legitimacy of the whole referendum."

2) Turnout Was Closer to 30%, Tatar Leader Says: Crimean Tatar officials monitoring the vote report that 99 percent of Tatars boycotted the vote, while overall turnout was actually only about 30 percent, said this Espreso.tv story and this Ukrinform item.

The huge turnout claimed for Sunday's referendum is also in sharp contrast to historic turnout in recent elections in Crimea, which hovers at around 50 percent, Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev told Espreso.tv.

For example, only 56 percent of Crimeans voted in the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election. 

In addition, for the vote Sunday, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian officials called for a boycott. Tatars and Ukrainians make up 36 percent of the Crimean population, further suggesting the claimed turnout is implausible.

3) Surveys Show Only 40-45% Pro-Russia Support: Two recent surveys, including one in early March, suggest only 40 to 45 percent of Crimeans actually support accession to Russia.

Support wasn't in majority territory and was nowhere close to the overwhelming result claimed by Crimea's pro-Russia government, which was installed at gunpoint after pro-Russia soldiers without insignia took over Crimea's legislature.

4) No International Observers: Outside monitors weren't present to monitor the vote -- a point many reporters failed to mention in their stories.

The Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe was in fact prevented from sending observers into Crimea on three occasions in the days leading up to the vote, while UN envoy Robert Serry was threatened by pro-Russian armed gunmen when he entered the region and was forced to leave.

Crimean authorities later invited the OSCE to send observers, but by this point the organization declined, citing its previous failed attempts to enter the territory and calling the vote illegal.

A small number of unofficial observers were invited from other countries, including a delegation of the European far right and neo-Nazis. The Russian government reportedly offered to pay expenses of any Russian-speaking EU citizens who wanted to act as an observer.

Reporters were also not allowed to observe voting, the Kyiv Post reported today.

5) Intimidation by Pro-Russia Forces: Few stories mentioned the multiplying reports of rights abuses in Crimea since Russian soldiers took control of the Ukrainian territory.

The rights climate again suggests voting wasn't conducted in legitimate circumstances.

The group Reporters Without Borders has called the region "lawless," while journalists and pro-Ukraine activists have been detained and gone missing. 

Crimean authorities took Ukrainian TV off the air, while blanketing the region with signs and messages supporting accession to Russia.

Heavily armed pro-Russia gunmen and gangs are ubiquitous and have created a climate of intimidation. Tatars say their people are afraid to venture into city centres and are fleeing to Ukraine.

Adding to concerns, a Tatar rights activist was found dead Monday in Crimea with signs of torture, the Kyiv Post reports.

6) Climate of Deception and Legal Impunity: Few reports questioned whether the vote could be credible in a generalized climate of misinformation and legal violations. 

That includes bizarre Russian and Crimean government denials that the thousands of Russian-speaking soldiers who have taken control of Crimea are in fact Russian soldiers.

It also includes Russia's discredited claims that it intervened in Crimea to stop anti-Semitic attacks.

Also salient, of course, is Russia's creeping invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law.

7) Exit Poll Dubious Too: The referendum result coincided closely with a widely reported exit poll yesterday that supposedly found 93 percent of voters favoured accession to Russia.

This poll was also uncritically reported in many stories. (See for example this BBC item yesterday.)

Unmentioned in most stories was the fact that the poll was commissioned by the KrimInform news service, which was recently created by Russia's state-owned Itar-Tass news agency.

The connection is important to note because of the Russian government's tightening control over media and the Russian media's notoriously pro-Kremlin coverage of the crisis in Ukraine.

Not sure why reporters outside Russia didn't do a better job.

Ukraine Crisis: Investigative Reporters Move Into Yanukovych Estate to Probe Corruption

In the wake of the Ukrainian revolution, the country's long-besieged investigative journalists have turned one of the most secretive locations in eastern Europe into a haven for transparency and accountability.

Deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's lavish 350-acre estate outside Kyiv -- which included an ostrich farm and a private lake complete with a full-size moored pirate galleon -- has been taken over by a team of Ukraine's investigative journalists.

They're using it as a base to study tends of thousands of documents found at the residence that are helping reveal the tale of the staggering corruption of Yanukovych's regime.

Their work may help Ukraine track down billions that were apparently looted from state coffers during Yanukovych's four years in office.

President's Son Won 50% of State Contacts

In a country where the average person makes $500 a month, Ukraine's new government says $37 billion went missing under Yanukovych, while another $70 billion flowed into offshore accounts -- though it's not clear how much of the latter amount was illegitimate. The government says its coffers are now virtually empty.

As an example of the corruption, the ousted president's son -- a 41-year-old dentist -- accumulated vast wealth during his father's short time in office and was reportedly worth $500 million in Nov. 2013. His various holding companies are reported to have won 50 percent of all state contracts in Jan. 2014.

The newfound freedom of Ukraine's investigative journalists is in sharp contrast with the country's recent record as one of the world's worst places for press freedom. In 2010, after Yanukovych came to power, the country fell from 90th place to 131st place in the annual press freedom ranking of the group Reporters Without Borders -- winding up behind Iraq and Zimbabwe.

The Ukrainian journalists have created the YanukovychLeaks website to publish their findings. Read more background here.

Investigative Reports: U.S. Drone Hits Based on Flimsy "Geolocation" Intel

U.S. drone assassinations are often based on flimsy and unreliable intelligence, such as the location of a cell phone SIM card, according to this interesting investigative report by former Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald and journalist Jeremy Scahill, who both specialize in intelligence issues.

The SIM card "geolocation" intelligence is rarely confirmed by a human source on the ground to make sure the possessor of the SIM card is actually the intended target, they write on Greenwald's new investigative reporting website, The Intercept.

The target is often selected simply because of "metadata" activity deemed to be suspicious--such as repeated contact with other suspected militants--and isn't verified through other methods, says the story, citing an anonymous former drone operator who is troubled by the assassination program.

Unintended Deaths

The imprecise targeting has led to the killing of unintended and unknown people, the story says.

While a Guardian columnist, Greenwald reported extensively on whistleblower Edward Snowden's unprecedented revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency's massive dragnet spying operations on Americans and non-citizens alike.

The Intercept promises "aggressive and independent adversarial journalism" on a range of issues.

It has also posted a second piece featuring never-before-seen aerial photos of NSA and other U.S. intelligence facilities.

Read more about the latest NSA revelations in this Democracy Now! interview with Greenwald and Scahill.

State Lawmakers Seek to Cut Off NSA

In related news, state legislators in Maryland, Arizona, Tennessee, Washington and California have proposed bills to deny water and electricity to NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, and other facilities of the agency, this news item says. The moves are in protest over the NSA's sweeping spying programs.

One bill now before the Maryland state legislature also bans the use of NSA-derived evidence in state courts and prevents state universities from partnering with the agency on research.

Investigations: MD's Book Says Pharma Suppresses Unflattering Drug Studies

Just saw this interesting Ted report on a book by UK MD Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients.

Goldacre talks about how pharmaceutical companies conceal unflattering studies that show their drugs are ineffective. He said he was himself duped into prescribing medicine he says was ineffective to a patient after reading about positive research.

Later, he learned the "positive" results were from only a single study, while other studies were less flattering or had gone unpublished altogether.

The Ted item raises questions about evidence for five common medicines.

"Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments," Goldacre writes in his book.

"We only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects."

Awards: Go Behind-the-Scenes With Canada's Top Investigative Journalists and Stories

This just in: The Canadian Association of Journalists has put out the annual special awards edition of its magazine Media.

It's got first-person stories from some of Canada's leading journalists talking about how they did their award-winning stories.

Featured are the finalists in the latest CAJ and National Newspaper Awards.

It's a great primer for how to conduct a professional and impactful investigation -- besides simply offering some great storytelling.

Investigative Journalism: Acetaminophen Overdoses Killed 1,500 in U.S. in Past Decade

Excellent investigative series here from ProPublica on the little-known dangers of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

The popular pain-reliever has killed about 1,500 Americans in the past decade due to overdoses, the investigation found.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known about the dangers, but hasn't acted to inform the public or taken other action to reduce overdose risks.

The problem is the drug has such a small margin of safety between recommended doses and dangerous levels, the investigation found.

Story idea: If you're a journalist in another country, ask your own government's officials what they're doing.

Legal Stuff: U.S. Journalist Faces 105 Years Largely For Posting a Public Link

Extraordinary story here of the Obama administration's aggressive approach to whistleblowers and journalists.

A U.S. investigative journalist, Barrett Brown faces an incredible 105 years in jail, in large part for posting in a chat forum an already public url link to internal emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which were hacked by a third party.

Brown has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post.

He's been in custody since a heavily armed FBI raid on his home in Sept. 2012, after which he was denied bail.

If all this wasn't amazing enough, Brown and his legal counsel were slapped this month with a gag order preventing them from speaking to the media about the case.

Read more about Brown's chilling case in this Rolling Stone story and on this support site.

Investigative Journalism: Radiation Rises Dramatically in Dental Offices

Despite growing awareness of health risks from x-rays, radiation is on the rise in dental offices - thanks to the growing "indiscriminate use" of CT scans, which pump out as much as 60 times the radiation of conventional dental x-rays.

Read how a dental x-ray radiation could affect your health, what authorities are doing to minimize it (or not!) and what you can do about it in this story I just did in Vancouver's Georgia Straight weekly.

See more background on the problem in this New York Times investigation, which revealed that questionable marketing has fueled an explosion in the use of cone-beam CT scanners in dental offices.

Resources: Investigative Journalism Techniques From the Black World

Just found this interesting top-10 list of books written about the failure of torture to provide useful information, written by U.S. army lieutenant-colonel Douglas Pryer, who is in military intelligence.

Pryer's list consists mostly of real-life war-time accounts of interrogators who used respect and brains to bring around captives, instead of brutality.

Such accounts aren't just valuable as an indictment of torture and the media that supports it in various movies and TV shows.

They also present techniques of information gathering useful to a journalist dealing with reluctant sources (including those in the security and police community whose experiences are recounted in the books).

Pryer is also author of Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-April 2004.

Astute readers may recall an earlier post I wrote on the same topic back in 2010. It was about a 203-page study of "intelligence interviewing" produced by the U.S. Intelligence Board, which answers to the CIA director.

Investigative Journalism: Mine Deals "Looting" Congo

Interesting in-depth report here from Bloomberg Markets Magazine on Dan Gertler.

The 38-year-old Israeli billionaire built a fortune out of Congo's vast mineral riches thanks to his close personal relationship with Congolese president Joseph Kabila and lucrative deals that let Gertler purchase resources below their value, the Bloomberg report says.

Meanwhile, Congo remains one of the world's poorest and most corrupt countries. Governance is so bad the International Monetary Fund cut off loans worth $225 million U.S. because a lack of transparency in mining deals, according to IMF official Antoinette Sayeh, who is cited in the story.

"Dan Gertler is essentially looting Congo at the expense of its people," Congolese mining watchdog rep Jean Pierre Muteba tells Bloomberg. 

Gertler dismisses such critics, saying he aims to help Congo as well as himself. "At the end of the day, yes, I'm looking to create a lot of wealth," he is quoted saying.

Investigative Journalism: Fukushima Waste Being Stored at Playgrounds, Schools With Little Oversight

Here's a new one from the Fukushima file.

While Japan's government continues to struggle to deal with the Fukushima nuclear disaster, local communities are storing radioactive dirt, sludge and debris in playgrounds and other public places, according to this excellent Christian Science Monitor report.

In one city 150 miles north of Tokyo, groups of children played in a playground where hundreds of bags of the radioactive waste were stored a few feet underground in an unmarked, unfenced corner, the reporter discloses.

While government scientists assure that the risk of the radioactive isotopes in the waste seeping into the groundwater "quickly" is "low," there is no mention of an actual risk assessment or method used to calculate that risk.

And of course, local residents are flabbergasted. One found that at least 20 other such disposal sites in parks  and public spaces exist in his city alone. It's not clear if there's any monitoring of whether radioisotopes are leeching out, and officials even refuse to put up signs.

Across Fukushima prefecture, waste was being stored at 1,027 schools and 788 parks, according to the story, which says the sites are "scantily regulated."

Investigative Reporting: Regulators Ignore Autism Drug Side-Effects

The Toronto Star has published a troubling and well-done example of investigative reporting on autism and how regulators have mishandled oversight of drugs used on kids thought to have the ailment - some as young as 4.

The Star story, by David Bruser and Andrew Bailey, documents a pattern of serious, sometimes fatal health side-effects from the drugs, which have been largely ignored by government regulators.

The story is especially striking when read alongside a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in March that said the youngest children in a classroom are diagnosed with autism more frequently than older children, raising concerns that many schoolchildren are being misdiagnosed.

Resources: Your Journalism Reading List - Investigative and Otherwise

Good reading list here on online journalism for newbie and vet journalists alike at UK journalism prof Paul Bradshaw's Online Journalism Blog.

And here also on the same site is a great list of free ebooks on journalism, including on investigative reporting.

Among them is journalism prof Mark Lee Hunter's very interesting-looking 209-page The Global Casebook: An anthology for teachers and students of investigative journalism.

A companion to the UNESCO primer on investigative journalism that I blogged about in July, also written by Hunter, The Global Casebook features a fascinating list of dozens of investigative stories from around the world accompanied by notes about how each story was done and its impacts.

Investigative Reporting: Needed for Basic Stories Too! Case in Point - That Organic Food Study

Big news in recent days about a study purporting to show that organic food isn't healthier than conventional varieties.

Here's yet another example of how reporters too often report uncritically about science and health issues - and why an investigative approach is so often useful even for reporting regular news, not just in exposés and lengthy features or docs.

The study, in a meta-review, found the following: "The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."

In terms of health, "there isn't much difference" between organic and conventional foods, study coauthor Dena Bravata said in a CBSNews.com story.

This prompted headlines such as CBS's "Organic foods hardly healthier, study suggests" and CBC's "Organic food's health benefits questioned in U.S. study."

Uh, What about Pesticides?

Interestingly, virtually none of the headlines highlighted the fact that conventional foods had dramatically higher levels of pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Few reporters went on to look into the health impacts of consuming pesticides or antibiotic resistance - or if they did, that was buried far down in their stories.

Rather, the reporting highlighted the study's finding that pesticide levels in conventional foods generally didn't exceed government ceilings.

But wouldn't more pesticides and antibiotic resistance make any difference for health - even if they don't violate regulations? Sure, they could, as this Mother Jones piece about the study and the flawed reporting discusses.

In fact, this review of the study by Washington State University's Charles Benbrook says the study failed to include important evidence from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture about toxicity of pesticides and health risks from antibiotic resistance.

Not Nutritionally Better? Hmmm...

Finally, there's the question of whether organic food is more nutritious. This 2011 study came to the opposite conclusion: Organic food is more nutritious and in fact extends life expectancy.

In fact, this issue is somewhat of a straw man. Organic food is generally the same variety of produce, fruit or meat as conventional (with the exception of genetically modified food) - but raised using organic methods. It wouldn't be that surprising if its nutritional content isn't so different from conventional food.

Nutritional quality isn't generally why you'd eat organic food. The real reason would be less pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And that's exactly Bravata's study confirmed in organic food.

What was also lost in the coverage is that conventional food varieties (and organically raised versions of the same varieties) have seen a steady erosion in their nutritional content in recent decades. That's thanks to breeding techniques used to enhance the look of produce, even if it tends to reduce vitamin, calcium and iron levels, as this 2009 Mother Jones story noted.

If you want more nutritional content, look for heritage varieties of food - older varieties that still pack the same nutritional punch.

The issue is yet another example of why journalists and editors should bring a more investigative approach to their regular reporting - asking critical questions rather than just taking the easy way out.

Investigative Journalism Resources: Mentor Program Looking for Help, Open for Applicants

If you're a successful freelancer or investigative reporter, consider helping a newbie. In today's tough industry climate, they need all the help they can get. Or if you're a newbie yourself, a mentorship program can help you get going or to sort out a tricky assignment or career question.

The Society of Environmental Journalists has a successful mentorship program and is looking for mentors who can give advice in freelance pitching and investigative reporting. Find out more at this webpage.

Investigative Journalism: AOL News Exposé on "The Nanotech Gamble"

Just came across some great investigative reporting in this 2010 AOL News series on nanotechnology, which has become widespread in food, sunscreens and numerous other consumer products.

Nanotech has been touted as a miracle technology capable of curing all of humanity's ills - but the first safety studies have tied some nanoparticles to serious health risks, including cancer, the series says.

Meanwhile, regulations are virtually non-existent, even as nanoparticles are now in use in up to 10,000 products on the market - part of an industry fuelled by billions in government subsidies, series author Andrew Schneider reports.

The links to all the pieces in the series don't work and take you to Huffington Post's homepage. So I took the liberty of including the correct links here: "Regulated or not, nano-foods coming to a store near you," "Obsession with growth stymies regulators," "Why nanotechnology hasn't (yet) triggered the 'yuck factor,'" "Nano-products are everywhere," "Primer: how nanotechnology works," "Timeline: 16 key moments in nanotech's evolution," "Chart: federal nanotech funding shortchanges safety efforts" and "The nanotech gamble: AOL News' key findings."

Investigative Journalism: YouTube's New I Files Channel

Just learned of a great new investigative journalism resource, thanks to CBC investigative guru (and one-time boss) Cecil Rosner's worthy blog Canadian Muckraking.

YouTube has launched an investigative reporting channel called The I Files, managed by the U.S. Center for Investigative Reporting. Ten videos are already up, and future content will come from a pile of international sources, including The New York Times, the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

The channel was announced just a week ago and already has 1,700 subscribers. Scratch that -- just noticed it's now 1,701 since I started writing this!

Resources: Primer on Investigative Journalism

Interesting investigative journalism primer here from UNESCO. The 88-page e-book covers the basics -- from organizing your information to dealing with sources and presenting your results.