by Bart Vuijk
Continued from today’s opening story.
“ALWAYS take your readers very seriously,” I implored my fellow journalists in Brussels again. “I started investigating those graphite rains and the other emissions from the plant because people were getting sick. It’s always about people. Always. They are our readers, for whom we work.”
In the newspaper, I put pressure on the government. A provincial administrator, who would later resign after I revealed yet another environmental scandal, ordered a chemical study of the dust. It turned out to be toxic. Lead, vanadium, manganese, all sorts of heavy metals. The national health service RIVM convened a meeting in a sports arena. A thousand residents of the nearby town attended and panicked at the conclusion that the poison was especially harmful to their young children. In the months that followed, dozens of parents packed up their kids, put their homes up for sale and left. Others, who did not have this luxury, joined together in environmental organizations in order to fight Tata Steel. It was suddenly war. And I was in the middle of it as a reporter.
At that time, Tata Steel boss Hans van den Berg was still talking to me. I told him, “You managed to turn the world’s most plant-friendly town against you.” He didn’t respond, but banned me from the plant site for two years. I was no longer allowed to report, ask questions (which of course I asked anyway, but I got no answers), and invitations to the opening of new installations went to the freebie weeklies and the regional radio, which I thought was fine, by the way. His co-director came barging in to see my editor-in-chief and demand my head. But unfortunately for him, all the information I had put in the paper was correct, and his legion of expensive lawyers had no ground to stand on.
WITHIN the span of a few years I uncovered forty environmental scandals, the provincial manager in charge resigned because of my stories, the environmental movement grew larger and larger, and the plant was forced into a total turnaround. At the expense of billions of taxpayer euros, it is now saying goodbye to the lucrative but highly unhealthy coal-fired blast furnaces and desires to switch to a “clean” production on green produced hydrogen.
In 2022, I received the journalism award. My editor-in-chief had labeled my fight for truth “David versus Goliath”. The jury agreed.
I don’t really feel that way myself; I still feel that I all have done is doing my journalistic work very seriously. But when my wife and I were watching the movie Dark Waters on Netflix the other day, about the environmental scandal involving Dupont and pfas, I stopped the movie every five minutes. “Hey, I went through that too! And that, and that, and that…” I could relate, bigtime. The opposition, the high-profile opposing powers that be, the truth like an invisible giant that I pulled to the surface… You could make a similar film about Tata Steel.
I told all this to my audience of thirty, forty, and at one point even fifty people in Brussels. The group kept growing and the young investigative journalists even sat on the floor. To my no small surprise, they hung on my every word. I hadn’t counted on applause, but I got it. I simply told them how it all had transpired, how I did not feel like an investigative journalist at all, but simply went after the truth. I gave them my most important pointer at the outset.
Take your readers very seriously.
* Bart Vuijk is a newspaper reporter in the Dutch IJmond area. He won the 2022 Tegel for his reporting on Tata Steel. He and fellow reporter Linda Gottmer are nominated for this year’s award as well. The Tegel is the Dutch equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize for journalism.
