By personal experience we mean a journalist undertaking an entirely legal action, without concealing their identity, in order to test compliance to the law by others and uncover mistakes or violations taking place because of the system or its responsible people. For example, you might buy a prepaid sim card and verify that companies calculate the price of a minute correctly as they claim. Or you might go and play a particular sport that requires protective gear, and discover that the relevant authority is not interested in the safety of players and allows them to play in normal clothing. Personal experience is one of the most important sources of proof, particularly in investigations that involve careful inspection of legal procedures or routine official practice.
Eyewitnesses, no matter how good they are at telling you the facts, often do not pay enough attention to the detail of legally and procedurally complex processes to provide you with all the information you need. A journalist, on the other hand, can familiarize themselves with the process through careful research and then test it out themselves. Under these circumstances, they may end up having to conceal their identity. Majdoline Alan, for example, produced a report on government failures to implement the Jordanian Freedom of Information Law, published in Al Arab Al Yawm in 2010. All she had to do was submit for requests to the relevant government offices and see whether the procedure was completed as stipulated by law – that is, whether the request was accepted and processed by the deadline imposed by the law and the form and content of the response.
She then submitted a complaint to the Information Office, and brought a lawsuit against the Land and Surveys Bureau for failing to respond to a request for information on the sail of government land. By carefully documenting every stage of the process, she was able to demonstrate that the law suffered from loopholes and was not being enforced. The team behind a 2014 investigation into misleading adverts that tricked girls into working in prostitution wanted to find out how adverts of this kind were finding their way into respectable newspapers, and how much effort newspapers put into verifying advertising submissions. They thus submitted misleading and vague adverts offering work for girls to two national newspapers. The newspapers did not request any proof of personal or organizational identity in order to confirm the veracity of the adverts. After the publication of the story, the government introduced legislation obliging newspapers to run checks on advertisers.
You might reasonably ask what the difference is between personal experience and disguise. In the latter case, a journalist changes their identity. They go into a place that would be difficult to enter honestly under false pretenses, because without doing so they would be unable to prove their claims, and because if they were discovered, they would not get the information they were looking for. We will discuss disguise in more detail later. Personal experience, meanwhile, does not involve a change of identity. The journalist goes in like any other normal person, exercising their right to do so. Their identity being revealed would have no effect on the operation. Nor would it put them in any danger. In this case they are a service user or customer like any other. Secret operations are more complicated and subject to more conditions.
You should always think carefully before using personal experience and make sure that it is going to be useful and add value to the investigation. It should contribute to uncovering the truth and proving the hypothesis. When gathering information through personal experience:
• Do not conceal your identity. If asked, you should answer honestly. But you should not volunteer this information without being asked, as it may skew the results.
• Do engage with the system as a normal citizen – as a normal service user or customer – in an entirely legal way, in order to find out how it works and identify problems.
• Do repeat the experience multiple times in order to prove that the problem is systemic and cannot be attributed to bad apples.
• Do conduct in-depth, careful research, in which you familiarise yourself with the relevant regulations and procedures before engaging with them.
• Do be careful to engage with the process like any other person. • Do be careful not to attract attention.
• Do document everything that you do and everything that takes place. Ask for and hold onto receipts, cards and documents, take photos and record films, or write everything down in detail as soon as you finish.
