In January 2004, a group of Armenian journalists visited the United States to learn about American investigative journalism. After arriving in Washington, DC, we were sent to eight different states. It fell to my lot to discover a not-very-big city in Texas, which, however, represented America 's second largest state in area, after Alaska.

Fort Worth

The city where I spent two weeks is called Fort Worth . It was built in 1849 as a fort to defend Dallas from the Indians. In 1857, it officially became a city with its own governing bodies. Fort Worth has a mayor and an eight-member city council. The mayor and the council members are elected for two years, but there is no limitation for reelection. Their positions are voluntary-the mayor and the councilmen receive a symbolic salary of $75 a week, and they all have other occupations. The mayor, Mike Moncrief, is from a wealthy oil family, and the council members are well-known businessmen and lawyers. The executive power is carried out by the city manager, who is appointed.

American democracy works best at the level of local government. The Fort Worth municipality helds a referendum before implementing any important project in the city. Both official and unofficial city council sessions are open to the public. If the city council decides to hold an unofficil meeting, it informs the public and the press within 24 hours. The meetings are broadcast live.

The population of Fort Worth is 500,000. They are mostly Spanish speakers - Texas was a Mexican state until 1836. This is one of the reasons they call it an independent state. According to Max Baker, a reporter for the Star Telegram, "The self-appraisal of the residents of Texas is directly proportional to the size of the state."

The symbol of Fort Worth is the bull. Bull's heads welcome visitors to every restaurant. Unlike other states, where you can find cuisine from various nations, people in Texas are very proud of their traditional barbecue. In addition to barbecue, Texans have two other sources of pride - cowboy hats and cowboy boots. Men in Texas don't feel like real men without them. On Friday evenings, the men in Fort Worth put on their best hats and crocodile boots and go to Billy Bob's to dance and have fun with the fairer sex. On Friday evenings, watching the traditional dances and listening to country music, I felt like I was in the 1800s-it reminded me of American Westerns, with cowboys in wide leather belts and revolvers in their holsters. Everything here seemed just the same as it was a hundred years ago. The explorer Alan Le May wrote about Fort Worth in 1954, "I was surprised at how little the city had changed since my last visit thirty years ago." For me, this permanence was very pleasant.

What they investigate at the Star-Telegram

In Fort Worth, I was a guest of the Star-Telegram - the city's leading newspaper, established in 1906. In addition to the Fort Worth office, it has two bureaus, in Northeast (the Northeast Star-Telegram) and Arlington (the Arlington Star-Telegram). The circulation of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is 350,000. Although investigative journalism has a hundred-year-old history in the United States, the Star-Telegram's department of investigative journalism was only established in 2000.

Lois Norder, the editor of the investigative department, recalls, "In 2000 our reporter, Yamil Berard, wrote an article about construction work in the Fort Worth schools. The work was being done by a company whose owner was a criminal. After we ran that article, our newspaper had a lot of problems with the company. Their lawyer presented the publisher and the editor-in-chief with a list of 50 points 'proving' that our newspaper had lied, and demanded one million dollars. We proved that the newspaper was correct on all 50 points. After two months, the company contacted us again, this time presenting us with a list of 12 points. We again proved that the newspaper was correct on all 12 points.

"All this went on for a year. After that, they stopped calling us demanding compensation. (According to Texas law it is only possible to sue for libel within the space of one year.) For that article, Yamil received an award for being the best investigative journalist in the state, and so we established the investigative department."

Fort Worth is a very quiet, safe city, and it looks at first sight as though there isn't much to investigate. But in fact, investigative journalists from Star-Telegram have no shortage of subjects. "We get subjects for our stories from the society; we concern ourselves with what the people consider worth investigating. At the same time, we examine issues that no one pays attention to, that we aren't informed of or called about. Our editorial board examines what's going on around us and the issues that affect public life - for example, whether taxes are spent efficiently or not, discusses them with the reporters, and decides which subject to proceed with. One of our best investigations was about a minister who had a religious show on TV and was well known. This minister was stealing from people; he was collecting donations and instead of spreading the word of God, he spent this money to build a house, and to buy several airplanes. We learned about this because some women appeared in area whom the minister had promised to marry, and he had taken their money. Our investigation went on for five months. The reason we got involved in the case was the fact that no one looks out for people like that-the government doesn't get involved, and neither do other ministers, and the people can't do anything about it.

"In this case, the newspaper was the last resort, the only way to somehow get justice. Everyone understands, the newspaper, too, that people break the law all the time, but there aren't always grounds for investigation. We look for situations where we believe that the system isn't working, or there was some loophole that allowed the criminal to go unpunished. Or when a defect in the system contributes to the crime," Norder continues.

The investigative team at the Star-Telegram consists of six journalists, who produce between 25 and 50 investigative pieces a year. Sometime they are of strictly local significance, but the team believes they are very important: "It is easy to write about things that aren't in your backyard; many newspapers write about big national issues and win the Pulitzer Prize. For us, the important issues are the ones that affect the readers in our city. Often, these are subjects that don't get the Pulitzer Prize, but no one else is writing about them. These are tough subjects that make the influential people around here worry, make them mad. We often write about events or people who are right in our midst, but no one pays attention to them, as if they were ghosts."

Lois Norder has spent fifteen years at the paper, and was concerned with these issues before the investigative department was ever established. She points out that although they publish many controversial articles, the newspaper has never been sued. "Since we are concerned with complicated subjects, everyone's prepared to attack us. Everyone's ready to sue us for libel, or for publishing unreliable information. My task is to make sure that the investigative articles are perfect, that there is nothing to catch, and no reason to attack us. After I finish editing an article, I send it to our lawyer. He reads it, and if there is something we can be sued for, we sit down together and discuss it and find different formulations to keep our newspaper safe from attack."

Nevertheless, Star-Telegram reporters are threatened from time to time for the articles they write. "People who agreed to be interviewed threaten us later on. Some hire lawyers who threaten to sue if we publish a given piece. People who are cleverer find an influential local figure or politician to go to the publisher or editor-in-chief and try to persuade them that the reporter is prejudiced, or has a personal interest and can't be unbiased, or that what we're doing is wrong. In some cases, the lawyers can ask the court to examine the state of mind of the journalist writing an article, and accuse him of bias. Sometimes before reporters do interviews, I ask them to rehearse with me, to help them clearly formulate the questions, first to get the answer, and second, to not give away their position or interest in the case; in other words the questions must be so correct that it would be impossible to sue us over them.

"If someone isn't happy about our publications, he can also cause us economic damage, for example, by getting groups of people together and trying to convince them not to subscribe to our newspaper, or by going to an advertiser and saying that if they don't stop advertising with us, they'll boycott their products. Or these people can stop answering our reporters' calls, or give information to our competitors," Lois Norder explains.

She has her own theory about investigative journalism: "Many reporters want to do investigative journalism because it is alluring, exciting, and interesting, but they can't imagine how much titanic labor it requires. Very few people can do investigative journalism, because it takes great strength, patience, and a certain intellectual ability. It's very hard work, and the reporters on my team are special. They like to solve intellectual problems, sort through complicated problems; they don't care about the opinions of people around them-it's not important to them whether people like them or not. They can ask questions that they'll be hated for. They have a tremendous sense of justice and are interested in writing articles that will change society for the better.

"I think that an investigative journalist is a psychologically unbalanced person. He is so involved in this complicated work, does so much digging to solve a case or even to draw conclusions, fights with so many people that he becomes a wreck from an emotional point of view, and has to put himself back together again every time, piece by piece. No sane person would ever subject himself to such torture; it's very hard. All investigative journalists are unbalanced.

"There are a lot of editors who don't want to work with them-they don't respect authority, they can rebel against their bosses. Naturally, an ordinary boss doesn't like this. These are people with many positive qualities, but also with many negative qualities. Most bosses don't approve of these qualities."

Judges and policemen don't like journalists

After investigative reporting, the second most complex department at the Star-Telegram is the department of legal and judicial issues. In Fort Worth, some sixty to seventy car accidents happen every year, and about the same number of crimes are committed. Deanna Boyd, who reports on criminal matters, doesn't think this figure is particularly high, and says that Fort Worth is a quiet city in terms of crime. Unusual murders, however, do take place. In order to follow the crime situation, Boyd uses a scanner to listen to the police communicate over the radio. It can't, of course, be tuned in to the frequency that policemen use to keep professional secrets from journalists. Although policemen don't trust the press, Boyd says they duly provide journalists with information.

There is a special room for journalists at the city police department, where every crime reporter has a box for documents. Every morning, police reports on the events that occurred over night are placed in these boxes. Boyd says that her readers like stories about about murder: "I tell the story the way it happened, to make sure that the reader gets a clear picture of reality. If the story is too awful, I put a warning for the reader at the beginning of the article."

Max Baker, another reporter who covers legal and judicial issues, also writes difficult stories-about prisoners, death-row inmates, etc. In general, as even judges here attest, sentencing in Texas is very severe. The death penalty is frequently applied- for murdering a child under six years of age, for double murder, for murdering a policeman, a fireman or an officer of the court while performing professional duty, for contract killing, kidnapping, and committing murder during a robbery.

Sharon Wilson, a Fort Worth criminal judge, handed down eleven death sentences during her thirteen years on the bench (in fact, in the United States, a jury decides whether to sentence a defendant to death or not, and the judge just affirms the verdict).

Five out of the eleven sentences have already been carried out, and Wilson isconvinced that they were just. But another judge,George Gallagher, is unreservedly opposed to capital punishment, although as Max Baker attests, the majority of Texans are for the death penalty; they are guided by the principle "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". Max Baker doesn't believe that capital punishment reduces the number of crimes in Texas , for "people never think about the punishment before they commit the crime."

Although trials are open to the public in Texas, the rights of journalists are limited. It is the judge who decides whether to allow taping, filming, or taking pictures or not. Max Baker says that the majority of judges tend not to give journalists such "privileges", so as not to turn the courtroom into a "circus". We met George Gallagher, one of the rare judges who are well-disposed to journalists, in the courtroom, as he was amicably explaining to a man accused of murder what crime he was charged with, and what the punishment could be. According to Max Baker, this judge never turns journalists away, as was confirmed by our own experience.

Freedom of information is endangered in the United States

American journalists acknowledge that since September 11, 2001, they encounter difficulties in obtaining information on government actions. "We can't get documents from the departments of defense and homeland security," says Lois Norder, the editor of the Star-Telegram's investigative department. "Every time they are able to argue that the provision of such information may constitute a threat to the state, or that people can can use the information for attacking the country, they can turn us down. It's becoming more and more difficult to get information. Of course, it's understandable that they try to protect the state, but as a result, we are unable to verify whether the government's decisions are correct, or whether our money is being spent efficiently. The main thing is, the government doesn't want us to know what it's doing." All the journalists I met say that the American people support the government's actions, because they are afraid of terrorism.

"Journalists write a lot that freedom of press and information is threatened by national security, but people are frightened, and they concede their civil rights to security," says reporter Mike Lee. The Patriot Act, adopted after the terrorist attacks in New York , preclude journalists from getting information about foreign citizens who have been arrested.

"This Act was supposed to prevent terrorism, but in fact it is limiting human rights - something for which the US has always criticized other countries. It is possible now in the United States to suspect everyone, to arrest everyone without informing anybody, without preferring charges. When journalists criticize this, they are accused of being unpatriotic," says Dianna Hunt, a Star-Telegram editor. Jim Lane , a city council member, is angry about it: "They are Nazis in Washington .I don't approve of Bush' policies. Freedom of the press is the most important thing, and its impact will be seen in November during the presidential election. People don't understand that the less freedom there is, the less security we have. Politicians here hate the press and they fight against it through various 'acts'," Lane concludes.

The US Freedom of Information Act is considered one of the best in the world. Nevertheless, American journalists are convinced that federal laws are more like declarations, and state laws are more effective. State laws define concrete deadlines for providing information (in Texas - ten days). But there is another thing that makes it hard to get information. A journalist in America pays for both the copy of a document and the time spent by an official to prepare the information in question. "For small newspapers it's very hard, because it's impossible to control how much time a bureaucrat spends on preparing a certain document," Mike Lee says. Once editor Dianna Hunt was asked to pay $60 million to get a certain piece of information, and only after the Governor of Texas interceded was the information in question provided for a symbolic fee.

The privacy of people's personal life is also endangered in the United States. "There is no personal privacy left since September 11th," Mike Lee explains. "The security services gather a huge amount of information but they don't have time to process it, and the information gathering becomes meaningless."

Jeff Claassen, a member of the Star-Telegram investigative team who deals mainly with obtaining and analyzing information, showed us a number of internet sites where you can find out anything about anyone - his or her credit history, driver's license information, criminal record, marital status, etc. But Claassen maintains that people in the United States aren't worried about what the government knows about them: "Most of them don't even know that this data is available on the Internet."

The Star-Telegram investigative team is looking into non-transparent actions by the government. "In this project, we will examine what is inaccessible, unattainable for a journalist. We'll try to find out what is considered a state secret, and whether it is a state secret, what its impact is on society, whether it is useful or harmful, and what people think about it," Lois Norder says.

The Star-Telegram reporters say that some subjects are taboo in American society. "Journalists are almost unable to report on the affairs of the Church. Texas is in the Bible Belt. There are a lot of spiritual, pious people living here," Lois Norder explains. "But at the same time, there are quite a number of 'false ministers' who swindle people, collect donations in the name of God, and spend this money to build themselves houses and buy airplanes. But it's hard to criticize the ministers, since the faithful think that reporters are criticizing God."

Yerevan-Fort Worth