How female journalists have broken biggest news stories

Scoop, Emily Maitlis and the female journalists who have broken the biggest news stories of the past decade

Scoop

Netflix’s latest hit movie, Scoop, has been the talk of the town since its release earlier this month. The star-studded feature is the latest journalistic procedural to revisit a sensational news scandal that rocked the world in recent history. 

It traces the logistical processes undertaken by the tenacious journalists and producers behind the BBC’s Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew that brought him down. These professionals, Emily Maitlis, the interviewer, and Sam McAlister, the producer, happen to be women who are both extremely good at their jobs. The movie has a similar motivation harboured by acclaimed movies like She Said, which followed Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the two New York Times journalists who broke the story about Harvey Weinstein’s decades of abuse and assault against women in Hollywood. 

Although Scoop hasn’t been getting overwhelmingly positive reviews, the general consensus is that it captures “the dynamics of a newsroom under duress” and evokes the “interesting” behind-the-scenes operation of a cut-throat environment. 

Who are some other female journalists who’ve broken extraordinary stories? We take a look at five in the past decade. 

1. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

On October 5, 2017, New York Times investigative journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story on Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse against women in Hollywood. Their 3,300-word Times article was largely credited with helping to ignite the #MeToo movement.

The pairs’ extraordinary journalism was recounted in their book, She Said, which was then turned into a movie, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. Their “bravura journalism” lead to a third of the (all-male) board of the Weinstein Company resigning, a day after their initial article went live. 

Journalists

2. Niloofar Hamedi

On September 16, 2022, Iranian journalist Niloofar Hamedi posted a photo on X (formerly Twitter) of the parents of a 22-year old woman, who was lying in a coma in a hospital in Tehran, fighting for her life. Mahsa Amini died later that day. Three days earlier, she had been detailed by Iran’s morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly. 

Her death instigated mass protests across the globe, and gave fuel to the ‘Women. Life. Freedom’ movement. Hamedi was arrested shortly after her X post, and held in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison. Earlier this year, she was finally released from prison on bail.

3. Alexandra Zayas

In October, 2012, Tampa Bay Times investigative journalist Alexandra Zayas published a series of articles exposing the child abuse occurring within unlicensed religious group-homes in Flordia. Zayas revealed that children were being beaten and locked in tiny rooms, “shackled, beaten, hurt so badly they nearly died.”

“Children have been bruised, bloodied and choked to unconsciousness in the name of Christian discipline,” she wrote in her breaking story on October 27, 2012. 

Her reporting and subsequent coverage led to a state-wide search for illegal children’s homes and tracking of abuse complaints against exempted religious facilities.

4. Megan Twohey

Before she was a journalist at the NYTimes, Twohey worked for Reuters. In late 2013, she published a piece titled, “Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas,” which exposed an underground internet marketplace where parents could sidestep social welfare regulations and sell off children they had adopted overseas but no longer wanted. 

She uncovered a number of children who were ‘handed off’ to new couples with no lawyers or child welfare officials present. The impact of Twohey’s investigation was profound. In Congress, a bipartisan group of lawmakers called for hearings to “identify ways to prevent these dangerous practices.” Florida and Wisconsin also introduced legislation to punish parents who re-home their adopted children.

5. Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch

In August 2015, 17-year-old Elord Revolte was killed by a gang of teenagers inside the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center. Nobody was charged for his murder. Later, juvenile detainees would allege that a staff member at the Center had started the fight.

In Miller and Burch’s multimedia investigative series for Miami Herald, staffers at the centre were revealed to be poorly qualified and harbouring criminal backgrounds. They frequently incited violence and organised bets on fights between the young detainees. The journalists’ investigation led to state-wide legislative reform. 

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