On the release of his new book Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East, we will be joined by writer and Jerusalem correspondent for The Economist Nicolas Pelham – and others – to discuss his optimistic and vivid reportage that spans the region, from Israel and Palestine to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We will discuss the roots of today’s sectarian tensions and how they have come to characterise the region as a whole – often without a full recognition of historical context, socio-economic factors, or the rich differences of the countries contained within it. We will look to the future and assess hope for a recovery from conflict and a return to religious plurality.

This event will be chaired by Iraqi-British journalist and political analyst Mina Al-Oraibi, a senior fellow at the Institute of State Effectiveness and a Yale World Fellow. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Middle East and has written extensively on US and European policies in the Middle East, in addition to conducting several high profile interviews including with US President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi.

The panel:

Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, and a writer on Arab affairs for the New York Review of Books. He spent five years as a senior analyst for International Crisis Group, covering the growing power of regional national-religious movements in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, and has worked as a consultant for the United Nations in Gaza. He was The Economist’s correspondent in Iraq during the 2003 American invasion and in the Maghreb. He is the author of A New Muslim Order (2008), which maps Shia resurgence in the Arab world, and co-author of A History of the Middle East (2004).

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, currently, for The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, and is the author of several books on Iraq’s recent history, including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq and most recently The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

Safa Al Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian journalist and filmmaker, and joint winner of the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Journalism. She has been reporting on Yemen since 2010, and was one of only a handful of journalists reporting from inside the country for a Western news organisation as the crisis escalated. She has directed numerous documentaries for the BBC and PBS, including Al Qaeda in Yemen: A New Front (2012), Saudi’s Secret Uprising 2014), and more recently, Yemen Under Siege (2016).

Firas Abi Ali is a Senior Principal Analyst for IHS Country Risk, with a focus on forecasting political and violent risks in the MENA region. His expertise includes Islamic finance in Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Egypt, with a concentration on political stability and the rise of Islamist militant groups, as well as the likely evolution of conflicts and ensuing risks across the region. He makes regular appearances in the media, including interviews with Reuters, Bloomberg, the BBC, Newsweek and CNN.

Dan Knowles, Nicola Hughes and Michael Blastland discuss data journalism

Blastland, along with fellow data journalists Mona Chalabi of The Guardian’s Datablog, Dan Knowles of The Economist and Nicola Hughes of The Times, chaired by Conrad Quilty-Harper of Ampp3d and formerly The Telegraph, had been brought together by Grapevine to give aspiring journalists an insight into the industry. The evening was a follow up on the organisation’s first event in April 2013 which brought together the country’s top student newspapers.

Read highlights of the second panel discussion here.

It's a full house #fbj pic.twitter.com/QeLUOOZdNz

— Max Benwell (@Max_Benwell) January 23, 2014

Quilty-Harper started the discussion by asking Blastland how data journalism had changed since he published his book The Tiger That Isn’t in 2008.

Blastland:

“The origin of the data does get better, we have a lot more people watching it for a start…[but] there’s huge amounts of uncertainty in recording numbers, there’s great difficulty in the interpretation numbers that go up and down all the time…there’s a lot of data.”

Hughes said that part of a data person’s job is trying to find out where problems can arise and to be constantly asking questions.

“A data person would be able to see whether the numbers are telling the truth or has an agenda. It’s about really understanding the integrity.”

http://twitter.com/bspeed8/status/426445622871605248

Knowles said that a lot of his job is looking at data, which has already been told, and debunking it:

“Mostly it’s just how do you get past the headline statistic and digging through spread sheets and finding a trend that nobody’s spotted… You have to self police and make sure that something that looks brilliant and gives you a fantastic statistic isn’t actually a blip.”

Quilty-Harper added:

“Interrogating the data is an intrinsically journalistic activity. You’re checking verifying, finding out whether it’s true essentially.”

Chabali said that the key to data journalism is going deeper into the story than just the data and interviewing people on the ground:

“They provide us with the backstory of the ‘why’ because so much of what we do is just describing ‘what’.”

http://twitter.com/kathryn42/status/426451235781488640

Knowles added:

“You have to combine it with interviews, it’s not enough to have a spread sheet and go ‘oh this is really interesting’… you have to start with the spread sheet but…then you go visit somewhere and you interview people and then you write the story.”

Oliver Franklin of GQ in the audience asked how has the Internet and social media changed the representation of data?

There are many more ways to tell it Knowles replied:

“The freedom of the internet is that you have an unlimited amount of space. You can have this story told through data visually as well as the text underneath it.”

But with so many ways of representing the data do all journalists need to be able to handle data to some degree?

Hughes:

“What you need is more data journalists to let you deal with the raw ingredients and not wait for the press release or the end result statistics…what they’re [organisations] doing now is they’re releasing the data raw… saying ‘we’ve done what we said we’d do we’re not hiding anything’. The problem previously was access to the data, now it’s too much data.”

The initial problem was that data was inaccessible, now it's that it's overwhelming. #fbj

— Hari Sethi (@Hari_Sethi) January 23, 2014

http://twitter.com/MirrenGidda/status/426450151918813184

Quilty-Harper ended by asking the panel, what are their dos and don’ts for those wanting to get into data journalism?

Chabalis:

Do have an instinct to not merely describe – also analyse why.
Don’t be afraid of being able to master different things, you can’t just be a good writer, you can’t just be familiar with spread sheets, you need to know the basics of coding, you need to know several different tools (or know someone who does).
Do not be arrogant – not only checking other people but check yourself.

Knowles:

Learn to use the ONS (Office for National Statistics) website – that will give you an advantage.
Learn how to find statistics quickly.
Learn how to pick a statistic that’s valid and that can debunk or prove a story.

Hughes:

Do not feel you need to be taught something to be able to do it, do not rely on anyone else to teach you – Google it. There are so many free resources.

Blastland:

“Don’t be seduced by the glamour of exciting flashy stuff, remember that you can produce rubbish very easily and seductively with all those techniques. If you do not have the skills of statistical inference to make sure that you are saying something legitimate, all the rest is rubbish. Exciting rubbish.”

Following the success of their events, Grapevine are launching a data-focused site in the coming months. Get in touch with Harry Lambert (@harrylambert1), Max Benwell (@maxbenwellreal) or Rebecca Choong Wilkins at contact@grapevinevents.co.uk.

Watch and listen back:

It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.

“You need to be sitting down for this story” said chair, Edward Lucas, foreign correspondent with the Economist. “Could those people at the back find a space?”

William Browder was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia with the Hermitage fund before he was thrown out of the country in 2005.

Sergei Magnitsky

“Twenty-five police officers raided my office in Moscow” Browder said, “and 25 more police officers raided the office of my American law firm. . . . One of the lawyers protested at the seizure of these documents and he was beaten so badly he was hospitalised for three weeks.”

Browder hired seven lawyers to find out more about the mess, one of them was a 36-year-old Sergei Magnitsky. They started an investigation that unearthed a high-level attempt to siphon a high-volume of funds. It was a complicated scheme that lead to a false tax refund of $230m that came – not from Browder‘s company but from the Russian taxpayer.

Six out of seven of Browder’s lawyers left  Russia for safety. Sergei Magnitsky decided to stay.

“He testified against the police officers who did the raid used to get the documents . . . and one month later the same police officers came to his home . . . and arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention and then began to torture him.”

He was later sent to the infamous Butyrka prison and got very sick after months of serious mistreatment.

“They did move him to a facility that had an emergency room but instead of treating him in an emergency room they put him in an isolation cell and chained him to a bed and allowed eight riot guards with rubber batons to beat him until he died.”

Browder is now trying to push the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act through US congress. If approved, this would allow assets of those responsible for his detention, abuse or death to be seized.

Corruption

Brutal truths about the Russian state unravel through the Magnitsky story. From a citizen’s point of view, bribery is a part of what Masha Gessen, author of a recent book on Putin, says is the “daily humiliation of living in Russia”.

But she said corruption in the country should be concerning from a strategic point of view, too.

“Russia happens to have one of the two largest arsenals of nuclear arms that’s reason enough to pay attention to the fact that . . . it’s extremely corrupt and on the brink of collapse.”

According to Browder the rot runs deep. He cites the beginnings of the investigation that ultimately led to Sergei Magnitsky’s murder.

“I discovered . . . that all the Russian companies I was investing in were basically losing all the money they should have been sharing with the shareholders with a bunch of corrupt officials and corrupt management.”

Putin

Gessen said the Russian president models government on the Russian spy agency – his former employer.

“I think Putin seriously believes that the KGB is the best thing ever invented. And he’s done everything in his power – and that’s a lot –  to re-shape Russia in the image of the KGB.

“The KGB’s a closed system, it’s best on personal connections and paranoia, where information comes in and doesn’t go out.”

This is the system that allowed Magnitsky’s death. As Browder said when asked by the audience what happened to his Russian investments, “I didn’t lose any money, I lost something far more precious; the life of a young man.”

Against a backdrop of growing discontent, and widespread allegations of fraud, Russia’s recent elections heralded Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency. The man who many still saw as Russia’s de facto leader will now resume his tenure, four years after ostensibly ceding power to Dmitry Medvedev. 

In light of these developments a panel of experienced commentators gathered at the Frontline Club to assess the past, present and future of Putin’s Russia. The evening was chaired by Edward Lucas, The Economist’s Deputy International Editor, in discussion with Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and author, and Bill Browder, an outspoken shareholder activist who was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was banned from the country.

Gessen, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, described Putin’s Russia as a mafia state in which large-scale corruption at the top relies on small-scale corruption at the bottom. She claimed that Putin “thinks the KGB is the best thing that was ever invented”, adding that she saw him as pleonexic – in that he suffers from the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.

Browder agreed, describing his own experience as “the story of how bad things have got in Russia, and emblematic of the bare face of Russia from the beginning to the end.” He began to withdraw his money when he realised that all of his companies were hemorrhaging money to corrupt officials. A saga ensued in which Russian police seized his assets, took control of his companies and – amongst other things – conspired to reclaim $230m that Browder’s companies had paid in tax.

What followed has now become an infamous tale of state corruption and brutality. Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer investigating matters on Browder’s behalf, was imprisoned and eventually murdered in custody. 

His is not the only case of this kind, as Browder and Gessen observed, but the unfailing bureaucracy of all involved led to the publication of an exact account of the events, written by Magnitsky, and a list of those responsible. Lucas described the Magnitsky list as “one of the most effective fires lit under the regime”, and Browder summarised the reasons behind its impact: 

“The people who committed these crimes didn’t do it because of religious intolerance, or ideological intolerance. They did this for money.”

Browder suggested that the regime was unsustainable, given the prevalence of events like this, but the panel recognised the inherent difficulty in ensuring a genuine transition of power. Gessen offered her own analysis of the regime’s ability to adapt and protect itself:

“With the whole reset campaign of the last 3 years, there were a lot of people who fell into Medvedev’s trap. The best way to think of Putin and Medvedev is of a president and a first lady: the first lady gets to reach out to people, and perform humanitarian gestures. That humanitarian gesture deceived a lot of people.”

Despite this, Gessen noted that the West is an important influence, even to the most corrupt Russian officials:

“More important than anything else, it’s the place where they keep their money. You can’t keep your money in Russia, there is always somebody better connected than you are.”

And, as the question and answer period drew to a close, Lucas suggested that Putin’s hold on power might begin to loosen if another disaster on the scale of the Kursk or Beslan were to strike:

“He handles these situations very badly. The people who’ve got a huge stake in the survival of the regime may wonder if they can keep it going for a few more years by pushing him downwards or sideways.”

Watch the event here: