police in colorado say there have been multiple fatalites during a shooting at a supermarket in boulder — amongst the victims is a police officer. several people were seen lying motionless just outside the store in the south of the city. one person is in custody. several western countries have announced sanctions against officials in china — over human rights abuses against the uighur population in xinshang prvince. the sanctions were announced as part of a coordinated effort by the european union, uk, canada and the us. the british prime minister says the uk — should be "under no illusion" that it will be hit with the third wave of coronavirus sweeping parts of europe before too long — the warning came as the eu prepares to consider whether to impose a ban on exports of the oxford vaccine to the uk.

now on bbc news — the media show. hello. what kind of health is british investigative journalism actually in? better than you might think — perhaps because a lot of it is happening away from national titles and being conducted by local journalists, for instance, in manchester. or, perhaps, it's because a lot of it's being done by specialists, who are willing to work for a variety of titles. or maybe because a pandemic, being a complex and hopefully once—in—a—century event, lends itself to scandal, lea ks and whistle—blows. today, we're going to go inside the mechanics of investigative reporting to give you the nuts, the bolts, the fear, the loathing and the legal letters of being a proper investigative hack. let me introduce you to our guests. george arbuthnott is a deputy editor of the sunday times�*s insight team, jennifer williams is politics and investigations editor for the manchester evening news and rachel oldroyd

is managing editor and ceo of the bureau of investigationjournalism. it's actually the bureau of investigativejournalism, isn't it, rachel? it is. george, let's start with you. over the past year, you've been writing pieces on the sunday times over britain's handling of the pandemic, and your book on this is called failures of state. it's out this week. it features whistle—blowers from within the government and the nhs. how have you gone about cultivating sources during a pandemic? cos, presumably, you can't sneak off for a quiet coffee when we're all on zoom, as we are right now. that's right, but, funnily enough, in some ways, it's actually been easier because the key is to build up sources within the government and the nhs, and normally, particularly within the government, that if they've got their bosses overseeing them in the office, it's very hard to get a call in to them and have an open conversation, but because everyone�*s been at home it's actually been easier for them to speak freely.

what about the pub? i thought sunday times hacks back in the day used to cultivate them in the pub — usually the red lion in westminster, wasn't it? you're right. it does often help to meet people in person to build up trust. but actually, just the ability to ring someone up and have a frank conversation with them without them being supervised, it has certainly made a big difference in that respect. jennifer williams from the manchester evening news, i see you're nodding through what george says there. yeah, i was, while george was building those contacts, i suppose i was building some of those contacts in greater manchester. i wasn't health journalist before this, but my contact was in the public health system, so i went through a similar process. i actually found twitter to be very useful in that respect in terms ofjust having chats with people over direct messages.

i think sometimes people get worried about whether their messages... can be foi'd and that kind of thing, and they find social media direct messaging feels more comfortable, and i've noticed that with quite a few people that have talked over the past year or so. is that true for sources? if you are in touch with people through the direct message on twitter, it's a safer form of communication? because people often think of what snapple think of whatsapp or maybe telegram. i don't think... i think it's more of a psychological thing. people sometimes feel more comfortable having this conversation that way than doing it over text or doing it in another way, and i've noticed it a lot during the pandemic. the other thing is in common in what george was saying. people are sat in front of their laptops and if you just drop them a message and say, what do you reckon about this? what the health secretary hasjust said? they're all sitting ducks, really. no offence to my contacts. maybe bored people are better

sources because theyjust really want to tell people things. you're all nodding! rachel from the bureau, you've had your own stories, but we're also looking at amazon, walmart, facebook and more. how easy has it been to interest readers be beyond the pandemic? because the news over the last 18 months has been all virus. yeah, i mean, it's notjust all virus but a lot of trump too. i we've had a year of quite insatiable news stories. i it has been quite difficult. to think outside of the virus and what else is important. there are so many other. important issues and i think going back to sources, one of the key things i that gets people talking l is anger, and there's a lot of in the world at the moment, so people are really prepared l to talk about things. one of the key things that l we've found is that it is very difficult in the space to build up trust, so to find - these stories you don't know are out there. i to find stories about - the pandemic, to find stories about trump's leadership.

they've been easy in this world, but the stories . you just don't know exist, those are the tricky onesl in a world where we're i all in remote zoom—land. it's the ones you don't know you don't know, isn't it? if we're talking about investigative journalism, one of the most impressive still is the washington post. the last nine years, is editorjust retired. i sat down with them. it's another bonus interview for at the media show. it talks about the surprises that the washington post has won under his editorship and he looks at his time at the boston globe. if you've seen the oscar—winning film spotlight you'll know about his work. i'm going to play you a little bit of the interview now because i also asked him about how the washington post funds their world —famous investigations. because investigative journalism is expensive. the washington post is now in a fortunate position of having a rich owner,

namelyjeff bezos. ifjeff bezos hadn't acquired us, we would have been on the same deadline as previously. we would have had fewer resources, staff all of that. i don't think we would have been as powerful as we became because we achieved commercial status, we were able to achieve stability, reinvest our earnings because ofjeff. so i think it's made a tremendous difference. where and when did you and jeff bezos first sit down and discuss the paper's direction? we sat down of the executive team of the post at the time. he made clear from the beginning he thought that strategy of being regional and for and about washington may have been the right strategy for a different era.

of course, it made a lot of money over the years, but it wasn't the right strategy for the current era, because we were taking all the pain the internet had to offer, but we weren't taking what he called the gift of the internet. we weren't sure what that was at the time. he explained quite clearly that the gift was worldwide distribution at no additional cost because of the internet. we don't have to deliver papers everywhere, and he said we have the opportunity to be national and international. because you don't incur additional cost. you're in an ideal position to do so, because you're based in the nation's capital, because we have the name the washington post, which is a good name for going national and even international,

and because we had a tradition and heritage that was well defined in the public�*s mind. going back to watergate, shining a light in dark and holding up accountability. i should say you have won plaudits with the way you handled the relationship, but i wonder if you can reflect on whether it's sometimes an uncontrolled place forjournalists to be, being ultimately owned by somebody who has an incentive and seeing their competitors denigrated. right, but the thing is he hasn't interfered in our journalism at all and i'm grateful for that. i wouldn't have wanted be there if he had interfered. he thinks the paper should have its independence, it should do itsjob with integrity. he lets us cover amazon and him with total independence as well. i can tell you this, not all the stories are favourable and he doesn't command, he doesn't criticise us, he never suppressed a story, he doesn't suggest any stories.

and his competitors know we cover them fairly as well. we have full access to his competitors, regardless of the field it's in. whether it's in retailing or i—cloud computing orspace, commercialspace. you name it, they know we cover them independently, otherwise they wouldn't talk to us, but they do talk to us. well, that was the outgoing editor of the washington hear editor of the washington post and you can hear that on the bbc sounds app. by the way, you may have heard about the extended interview from last week. lots of people tweeting and talking about it. do check it out on the podcast. let's pick up on some things mentioned there. marty talked about having the pockets of a billionaire to fund pieces digging into the trump administration. last week, there were reports that the huffington post, which is owned by buzzfeed, is shutting down its uk news operation. buzzfeed had already shut down their investigative journalism. how does it fund its work? i think the first thing to say

is the stuff is expensive. i it takes time, it takes resource, it's risky. . it's a story that is in the public interest. i it's not necessarily- of interest to the public, so it doesn't necessarily... so it doesn't necessarily get the aaudiences. - so, yes, deep pockets are definitely neededl and we are seeing different models ofjournalism - of which the bureau - of investigative journalism is one. ourjournalism - is publicly funded, so we are a not—for—profit. we get grants from - foundations and money from individual donations. george, how is the sunday times�*s team funded? spikes in contributions around particular bits of investigative reporting like cambridge analytica — is

that true of you guys as well? honestly, the basis, for that is we rely on people believing ourjournalism is worth paying for. sunday times editors certainly believe that the readers want to pay for big investigations. and certainly when we get our first coronavirus story about how borisjohnson missed the first five cobra meetings on the virus, i think that garnered more than a thousand extra subscriptions, which would pay for our team for years. that's fascinating. you publish that story on sunday and then how do you get the departments... how do you know those thousand were people who like that story? people clicked on the story, people couldn't read it because it was behind the paywall, and they tried to click on the story and they had subscribed

on the story and then they can read it, so you can see directly where those clicks come from. that must be very encouraging for you. must be nice to have almost a direct relationship with the reader and their pocket. i mean, it was quite extraordinary. it was unprecedented in terms of my time on fleet street. i think it had 1.5 million views, which is the most the sunday times or times have ever had on any single article in its history. wow. we'll come onto the nuts and bolts of it because it was a spicy story and i imagine you got some pushback. jennifer, you write for the manchester news. how do they cover the cost of an investigation? your stories are not behind a paywall. ithink... so, myjob is a bit of a hybrid job, really. i still write news stories in between working in

the background on longer—form investigations, and that, kind of... it works for me because it means i can keep my hand in and keep an eye on what's going on. so i'm not necessarily taking two months out to work on an investigation. m not as— resource—intensive as that. however, i think there's a slight misconception that heavier—weight, for want of a better phrase, journalism doesn't get an audience online. i think in the early days of moving over to digital there was an assumption that was made that people only want to read about celebrities and look at pictures of cats. over time, we've learned that's not necessarily the case. one of the things we tried to do over the last five years or so is to play around with how we present those stories, how we tell the stories, how we headline them, how we tell them on social media. the importance of pictures

and good quality pictures online isjust as important as in print. we found out that audience is there for that content. don't get me wrong, there's really high—volume content, and viral stuff. but that's not to say there's only one man and a dog reading it. no. there's a higher volume of traffic in and of itself. it does actually get read and i think that's an important point because there is an assumption that it doesn't get read online, and it does. i don't want to misrepresent the daily telegraph, but there was a story suggesting there were some moves within the daily telegraph to start paying journalists according to the number of people that were reading their stories. it was a much more complex thing, but as a principal, do you... what do you think of the idea ofjournalists being paid by amount of people

reading the story? i don't feel comfortable with it. thin end of the wedge? i think there's an equilibrium there. when you picked up a print newspaper, people picked up newspapers for a mixture of different things. they wanted coronation street, sports coverage and politics etc. and it's part of the wider offer that you're giving to your audience. if you say actually, only this part works, i think you're doing a disservice to people. because people like the bundle, don't they? let's get into some of the stories. george, i want to go through some of the nitty—gritty. you've written that government advisers drew up a covid—i9 triage score that denied critical care to most people over—75. you quoted someone saying "it looked really nazi—like to me." i'm see you're grimacing — it caused a huge row. how many sources did you need to run a claim like that? we had documentary evidence

from the government committee that drew it up. we found the actual document online and we went to several members of that committee. i think there were probably at least five or six of them. and they confirmed that that was indeed the document that had been discussed, and then we spoke to numerous doctors and hospitals who confirmed they'd received the document and that it had indeed been used within hospitals to exclude elderly people, people with capabilities and people who are frail from receiving intensive care. 0k. what pushback did you get and from whom? we got a huge pushback from the nhs press office. who said what? who said that everybody had received the care that they needed and the nhs had not been overwhelmed. right.

so, for the people who aren't injournalism, you say x, nhs says not true, what happens next? we look back at what we got and compare it with documentation, the testimony from doctors on the ground in the actual wards. and then we compare it to their statements, and it was clear that we did not believe that what the nhs press office was saying was true in any sense. but we obviously ran our evidence and then carried their comments, and let our readers decide who they believe. after the story was published, did the nhs came back to you again and say we're going to change our relationship with you? was their any further pushback? no? i think i'd say tensions, there were certainly tensions between us and the nhs, and now whenever insight does a story that talks about stresses on the nhs we have a very tense exchange. soured relations.

rachel, the freedom of information, the bureau announced a big victory today. you won your legal challenge. a council will be forced to reveal where it was receiving taxpayer money. you called this a victory for investigative journalism. can you take us through this briefly? sure, we have been digging into council finances- for over two years. it's a very stretched area, i and councils as a result have been trying to find other means of increasing their funds. - one thing many councils have done is invest in commerciall properties, retail spaces, - and in digging into that area, we discovered that a very odd i thing seemed to be happening, that 150 councils were - lending money to thurrock, which is a small council. in essex which has a fairly

small budget each year. and we were quite curious. we wanted to know why they were borrowing so much money. - we clocked up over £800 million. - we wanted to know why- they were borrowing so much money from other councils. and we read through quite a lot of the council minutes, - we spoke to counsellors, - and we couldn't really work out what the problem was. and then we started to foij the other councils who lent the money to find out why they had lent the money. i anyway, after months and months of working on this and getting - documents from many other councils, it transpired - that they had been investing . a lot of money in green energy investments. and, in particular, - they had invested over £400 million into one vehicle, and this seemed quite risky. to us, so we just went to ask thurrock about their other i investments and we went. and asked them if they could confirm the investments

that we had found. - small pieces of puzzle along the way too, - and they basically said no. so we didn't get the response. eventually we had to take it all the way up to the - tribunal, and the tribunal... who's paying for all this? how are you funding it? it's being funded. this is two years worth of work on one reporters' part. - we had to pay for lawyers to put our case to the tribunal. | give us a sense of how much it cost. two years of one reporter and lawyers. you're edging towards a hundred grand? we got lots of stories out of it as well. - sure, sure, sure. i understand it's getting a lot harder to use foi requests because last month, the editor signed a letter calling for the investigation in the clearing house, which is alleged — emphasis on alleged —

to have profiled some journalists and blocked freedom of information requests. what do you make of that? i think it's a huge problem. this is decisions and money that is being| spent on our part. asjournalists, we should be able to have access to this, i but the public should be able to have access too. - the freedom of information act is a very powerful tool, - but it's increasingly. being pushed back on. it's being pushed backi on, as our case shows, by commercial interests. more and more privatel companies are involved in the public sector, - and one of the provisions in the act is councils . and governments don't have to disclose information about private companies. i and that's what our case - was trying to get at is we now have access to information| about council investments. 0k. jennifer, you've been tweeting at the weekend

about greater manchester police failing to record 80,000 crimes in a 12—month period. what do you make about this change to foi and its utility to investigative journalists? i tend to find the foi is quite difficult to use even the best of times, but during the pandemic, the law has changed so it was quite easy for organisations to say we can't access foi because you've got covid going on, which has then made it extra hard. here's the thing that often strikes me about the foi. when you get organisations that are repeat offenders and ones that never seem to answer, there are no real consequences for them. there are organisations that are very bad at answering, and there are a great many ways they can try and wiggle out of that information. and i completely agree that the more private sector

involvement in the public sector, the harder it is and the more likely they— are to be able to avoid it. george, the government pushed back last year. it's all detailed in your book. they had a blog challenging some of your conclusions. what was going on there? i think it happened once before. the ft did a piece about the ventilator shortages. in those early days, whenever a piece seems to be critical about the government, they seem to have attacked it by trying to undermine reporters. through the blog, it was quite extraordinary because it was deeply misleading. one example was they were trying to give evidence that the experts hadn't been warning in january that the pandemic would be serious. but they selectively quoted some scientists. when we went to the scientists for comment on this, they described it as selective quotation in a "kremlin—esque way" and they were hugely critical of it. who's behind that? that's a really weird thing. who do you think is behind it?

we were told they had this kind of unit that was set up that was checking this stuff out, which came out a day after our article. and itjust seemed extraordinary they were diverting so much resource to trying to devalue a piece of investigative journalism that turned out to be completely accurate. and in a pandemic where there's some strain on resources. this is something governments are striving to do a bit more on, rachel. we've seen with prime minister borisjohnson and chancellor rishi sunak, we see videos of them with photographers. you do find some there's something about technology that's given governments a sense that they should control the message much more. yes. government, big companies, the amount of people - governments employ now to get their message - out, pr companies. there's something like three pr people for. every one journalists.

so, we are fighting a huge battle of pr and laywers. i barage of pr and laywers. i mean, the amount of legal letters that we get in, - not just on the part of private companies, but on the part. of government too. they will redact documents that they said they - were going to give you. you'll get so much pushback, they'll get spokespeople outi trying to contradict i what you've just said. i mean, the army trying to push back on investigative _ journalism is growing and growing. - it it's a subject close to my heart. jane, advice for young journalists wanting to become investigative? make contacts, talk to them, and when you can, take them to the pub. thank you all very much indeed. rachel oldroyd, jennifer williams from the manchester evening news, and george arbuthnott of the sunday times.

earlier, we heard from martin, the former editor of the washington post. i'll be back at the same time next week. thanks for watching. hello. many of us started the week dry with some spring sunshine, but changes are beginning to take place. it is already turning cloudier, it will turn wetter and windier over the next couple of days and briefly colder for the end of the week. we've got a lot more cloud spinning in from the southwest during tuesday, especially across western parts of the uk where the cloud will be thick enough to give the odd spot of rain or drizzle, and some more persistent rain swinging into western scotland and northern ireland later. best of any sunshine across northeast scotland, central and eastern parts of england, turning quite breezy, even quite windy across the northwest of the uk. top temperatures between

nine and 12 degrees. now, this band of cloud and rain will push its way southeastward through tuesday night. on wednesday, it'll drag its heels across england and wales. further north and west you are, some sunshine but also some hefty showers. thursday is a sunshine and showers day and by friday, some of those showers could turn wintry as it starts to feel quite a lot colder.

welcome to bbc news — my name is mike embley. our top stories... police in colorado say there have been multiple fatalities during a shooting at a supermarket in boulder amongst the victims is a police officer. there was a loss of life, we have multiple people who were killed in this incident. i am sorry to have to report that one of them was a boiulder police officer. several western governments impose sanctions on china because of alleged human rights abuses against ethnic uighurs in xinjiang. a huge fire sweeps through a rohingya refugee camp in bangladesh — destroying thousands of homes. the dispute over covid vaccine supplies continues as the uk is warned the sharp rise in european cases

means it will not escape the effects of a third wave.