Challenges facing the Investigative Journalism in the Arab region

In the past few years, the Arab region has faced a very confused reality, as a result of chaos, conflict and dispersion in many societies, especially after the revolutionary movements that was part of what so-called “The Arab Spring” which refers to the Arabic revolutionary waves, where Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Iraq faced demonstrations, riots, protests, coups and even some of them experienced foreign interventions and civil wars. The political, and social changes in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, have impacted the freedom of journalism. Journalists are looking for the truth and are trying to take advantages of the amount of freedom available to enable them to carry out their journalistic tasks, while most of the authorities in the Arab world still consider this freedom as a threat for their power and control over the country.
This study investigates how the changes in the political situation have influenced the challenges that face the investigative journalism in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The selection of those countries due to that all of them have experience changes in the political situation as part of the Arab Spring revolutionary waves and all of those countries have also experienced an increase in the investigative journalism work after the revolutions, in addition, to that the political history, culture, religion and lingual background are similar in those countries. The study found that the challenges facing the investigative journalism are very similar in those countries and presenting the changes in the challenges that face the investigative journalism in those countries from a regional perspective give a stronger overall view on the topic of this study. The study identified six main challenges that face the investigative journalism in the Arab region, those challenges are connected to freedom, funding, security, law and legislation, access to information, and availability of knowledge, skill, and expertise. Some of these challenges were positively improved, some got worsened, and others stayed unchanged.