Investigative Journalism and the Politics of Information Closure

• In Event: Media and Misinformation

Abstract

Independent media in authoritarian settings frequently rely on official information when producing sensitive reporting, drawing on government statements, administrative records, and publicly available documents. While existing research emphasizes repression of journalists, less attention has been paid to how governments adjust the information environment itself in response to media activity. Understanding these dynamics is important for evaluating the effectiveness of transparency and accountability policies in non-democratic contexts, where formal disclosure institutions often coexist with informal constraints on information access. This paper asks whether independent media’s reliance on official sources leads to subsequent declines in institutional transparency among the referenced state bodies, and whether such responses represent a broader strategy of managing political risk through information control. To address this question, we combine (1) a corpus of more than 750,000 Russian independent media publications (2011–2022), from which we identify over 8,500 investigative articles and extract references to government agencies using text-based attribution, with (2) a novel NGO dataset measuring annual “openness” of 71 executive agencies (2014–2020), including disclosure of budget decisions, procurement information, and complaint-handling practices. This combination allows us to link media activity to changes in institutional transparency at the agency level. We map media references to specific agencies and construct an agency–year panel capturing variation in investigative attention. Using panel models with agency and year fixed effects, as well as event-study designs around spikes in investigative reporting, we estimate whether agencies experience declines in transparency following heightened media reliance. We also explore heterogeneity across agencies with different baseline levels of openness and varying exposure to public scrutiny. The findings show that agencies tend to reduce measured openness following periods of increased investigative attention. These results suggest that governments may respond to investigative journalism not only through direct repression, but also by limiting administrative transparency and restricting access to official information sources. By identifying information closure as a policy-relevant outcome, the paper highlights a mechanism through which states can constrain accountability while maintaining formal transparency institutions. These findings have implications for the design and evaluation of transparency policies, particularly in settings where governments retain significant discretion over the implementation and accessibility of public information.

Author

• Evgeniia Mitrokhina, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author