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- This is good journalism.
Following on from last week’s email about highlighting the good, today I’m bringing your attention to two huge pieces of investigative journalism. These are incredibly important stories. And, at a time when it is really easy and popular to call out mainstream media (often for good reason), these stories are an example of exactly what we need well-resourced corporate publishers to do.
Good journalism is very expensive to make. A single story can take days, weeks or months of research before a word is ever written – some journalists will be chasing a story for years before it’s able to be published. The legal risk for important stories is also incredibly high. Particularly in Australia. Who does has the cash for legal retainers and great defence teams? Mainstream media.
While I will continue to point out the failings and hypocrisies of mainstream media, I’ll never tell you to avoid them full stop – because it guarantees you will miss out on pivotal investigations like these. And in this house, we give credit where credit is due.
Here’s the gist of these two investigations, and I strongly recommend reading them yourself.
Consulting firm BCG modelled plan to ‘relocate’ Palestinians from Gaza by Stephen Foley, US Accounting Editor of the Financial Times
Context: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is a US- and Israeli-created nonprofit organisation created this year supposedly to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Its status as an aid organisation is incredibly controversial, as GHF uses armed forces (from the US, IDF and security contractors working for both countries) to guard its distribution centres in Gaza. Since the very first day of its operations, GHF guards have wounded and killed Palestinians trying to get to the distribution centres – you will have heard about these in the news.
The story: In early June, the Washington Post first reported that consulting firm BCG had provided pro-bono work for GHF, but was now pulling out and launching an internal investigation into their own work on this project. A few days later, BCG fired two senior partners for doing “unauthorised work” on GHF and failing to disclose “the true nature of the work” to the firm. Now, one month later, Stephen Foley’s investigation for the FT revealed what the work was: the BCG team modelled how much it would cost to “relocate” Palestinians from Gaza. This is also known as ethnic cleansing.
“More than a dozen BCG staff worked directly on the evolving project — codenamed “Aurora” — between October and late May. Senior figures at BCG discussed the initiative, including the firm’s chief risk officer and the head of its social impact practice. The BCG team also built a financial model for the postwar reconstruction of Gaza, which included cost estimates for relocating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the strip and the economic impact of such a mass displacement. One scenario estimated more than 500,000 Gazans would leave the enclave with ‘relocation packages’ worth $9,000 per person, or around $5bn in total.”
It’s a reminder that the violence of genocide, apartheid and war is not solely conducted by militaries and their contractors. There is a huge corporate industry that enables, enacts and profits off it too – people working with Excel spreadsheets, making presentations, wearing suits, getting lunch in the CBD.
The Justin Hemmes & Merivale expose by Eryk Bagshaw, Clare Sibthorpe, Bianca Hrovat, Natalie Clancy, Lucky Macken, and Cara Waters for the Nine newspapers
The story: It’s part of the Sydney Nightlife Investigation series, produced by journalists from four different publications: The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Good Food and 60 Minutes (all owned by Nine Entertainment). This is the team that exposed the Swillhouse sexual assault allegations — but the latest investigation into Merivale and its billionaire CEO Justin Hemmes is much darker. Many of these stories have multiple journalist bylines – another sign of how expensive and time consuming good journalism is.
This article details how Merivale’s exclusive VIP membership program provides consequence-free spaces for Sydney’s wealthy elite, criminals, and politicians to enjoy themselves, and how Hemmes uses that list to build and wield his political influence. It very comprehensively lays out Hemmes network, and is probably the most juicy report, I’d start with this one.
This article explains how the family house ‘Hermitage’ – which Merival and John Hemmes (Justin’s parents) bought for around $1m in 1973 – has essentially bankrolled the entire property and hospitality empire. They leveraged it for loans for more property, and so on… Hermitage house is estimated to be worth $200m today. This article does an incredible job of showing how heavily Australia’s property system favours the rich and helps them build wealth, while keeping its foot on the average person’s neck.
This article reveals that Merivale executives went to Mexico and South-East Asia to recruit chefs as part of a predatory and exploitative immigration scheme. Workers are forced to endure bullying, racial discrimination, serious overwork, underpayment, and dangerous work conditions, while trapped by the financial conditions imposed by their employment with Merivale.
There are more articles in the ongoing investigation, these are just the ones that stood out to me.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Maybe Me Too Is Really Dead on The Cut
A confronting read, take care with it. “In those hopeful early days of Me Too, when victims — disproportionately women and members of other marginalized groups — bravely offered up their wounds for the world to see, I believed their example would lead and our institutions would follow. Was that naïve? Should I have resigned myself to the idea that the violence ingrained in our patriarchal structures would be much harder to vanquish?”
What to Make Of the Mixed Verdict in the Diddy Case on Slate
And this one is a bit more about how to interpret the actual verdict. “To wit, the foundation of the entire defense was to frame the case as a witch hunt against a successful Black entrepreneur who has supported many people with his legal, and even awe-inspiring, businesses. The witch hunt defense against abuse allegations isn’t new … But Combs’ representation seemed to take this even further than Depp had, particularly as the attorneys were dealing with more complex—and harder-to-prove—legal claims.”
ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion on Taylor Lorenz’s YouTube
“A new form of techno-spirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that the AI is a type of all knowing God, or that it has been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us. Is this a new form of religion or mass psychosis? I dig into how tech became fused with spirituality, Silicon Valley founder worship, what the academic research on this topic says, and how we can stop more people from falling victim to this cycle before it's too late.”