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Malachy Browne

Malachy Browne
Malachy Browne is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from The New York Times visual investigations team.
‎Media Tribe on Apple Podcasts
Media Tribe is a show that tells the story behind the storyteller. It’s an opportunity to step into the shoes of the most respected journalists, directors and media executives. Each episode looks at the journalist’s journey into the industry, the impact they’ve had along the way and some of their m…
Listen to Malachy Browne on Apple Podcasts
Media Tribe - Malachy Browne | Las Vegas mass shooting, Russian bombs on Syrian hospitals and a body in Gaza
Pulitzer Prize winning Malachy Browne from The New York Times visual investigations team talks about the his journey from engineering into journalism, how he and his team pioneered a new form of explanatory and accountability journalism at The Times, the Las Vegas mass shooting, Syrian hospitals bei…
Listen to Malachy Browne on Google Podcasts
Listen to Malachy Browne on Spotify

Shaunagh talks to Malachy Browne

Malachy Browne is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from The New York Times Visual Investigations team.

Malachy has led investigations into Russian airstrikes on hospitals in Syria, the Las Vegas mass shooting, chemical weapons attacks in Syria, extra-judicial military shootings in Nigeria, the Saudi officials who killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, and the killing of a young Palestinian medic along the Gaza-Israel border. These and other stories have received a George Polk Award, two News and Documentary Emmys, three Overseas Press Club of America Awards, and Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, a Pulitzer Prize (2020) and a Pulitzer finalist citation (2017).

Malachy talks about the his journey from engineering into journalism, how he and his team pioneered a new form of explanatory and accountability journalism at The Times, the Las Vegas mass shooting, Syrian hospitals being bombed by Russian pilots and the killing of a young Palestinian medic along the Gaza-Israel border.

For more on Malachy

Follow Malachy on Twitter and follow his investigations here.

Episode credits

Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Episode transcript

Shaunagh Connaire:

Welcome to Media Tribe, I'm Shaunagh Connaire and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who cover the issues that matter most.

Malachy Browne:

Evan Hill,, who was one of the central team members stood up from his desk, he got a text message from our Russian video editor who was translating, and he said, "I've got a bunch of coordinates that these guys are using." Evan comes back, checks the coordinates against the hospital that we have, stood up from his desk and he said, "We have them." That proved without a doubt that Russian pilots had committed some of the worst atrocities in Syria last year.

Shaunagh Connaire:

My guest today is Pulitzer prize winning, New York Times journalist, Malachy Browne. Malachy has led investigations into the Las Vegas mass shooting, chemical weapons attacks in Syria, and he and his team investigated the Saudi officials who killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. Malachy, how are you?

Malachy Browne:

Shaunagh, good to be with you.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Well, Malachy, I feel like a lot of people will know of your work, but they might not necessarily know how on earth you landed in the New York times, And if you could tell us a bit more about your journey, that would be amazing.

Malachy Browne:

Great question about how I landed in the New York Times, pure fluke, I think. They had done an innovation report back around 2014, and nobody has told me this, but I think they realized there's a big gap between the Times that all of the other digital publications that were out there. And I think they started looking for advice about what they should be doing and people who are doing things in different ways and whatever. And Claire Wardle, who was a good friend of mine from the Storyful days was one of those people who came in. And I remember her saying to me afterwards, there was a big chemical blast in China, and I was working with a startup called Reportedly at the time when we were big into breaking news and visual news coming out on social media and stuff like that. And the Times hadn't yet reported on it and she used that as an example. And lo and behold, then I ended up in there for an informal chat and that just kind of led to, let's say a job somehow.

Malachy Browne:

I mean, it started back in Ireland with a print magazine that my uncle ran, my uncle is Vincent Browne, he's a journalist in Ireland, called Village. And that's where I kind of got my apprenticeship in journalism and production and photo editing. And when you're in a small magazine, you end up doing everything. And then in this type of journalism and kind of what was called social reporting at the time, with social media verification and news gathering, was with Mark Little at Storyful. I mean, that was crazy in the early days and it was kind of, nobody had done this before so we were very much making it up as we went along. But kind of technology and systems and a platform that enabled us to sort of make the most out of what was emerging in social media and of course the [inaudible 00:03:11] took off around that time, and that was the making of the company, I suppose.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Did you ever train as a journalist then Malachy?

Malachy Browne:

Oh, no. I came to it like I was... I studied engineering in college, I didn't study journalism at all. And then that was in the sort of IT kind of pre to the year 2000 boom, and I ended up doing computer programming for several years, about eight, nine years, I went back to it for a couple of years in between journalism jobs. So that was brilliant because I ended up traveling all over the world with that and made great friends [inaudible 00:03:51]. It wasn't something that I kind of was passionate about, and I suppose being influenced maybe by my uncle who was in journalism and maybe my dad and mom, a little bit. I was kind of looking for something else, I ended up doing a master's and then basically Vincent had Village on the go, at that time he needed a website and I kind of was looking for a start, you know what I mean? And he paid me a pittance, but anyway, I got good experience with him.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I mean, that's amazing. I mean, have you ever felt like you've used your engineering degree at all in your current role at the Times?

Malachy Browne:

Absolutely, the engineering degree? No, I was a terrible engineer, but in terms of like the computer programming days and that kind of stuff then yes, because just kind of knowing your way around websites and how to decode them looking for data within them, looking for patterns as well within sort of information that we're collecting. I mean, that was the information technology, journalism is the business of information, so there are parallels there. And just looking for patterns within it, organizing and structuring information as we're getting it. like the type of journalism that we're doing now is very evidentiary. And so we're using hard facts, hard details that we can elicit from timestamps of video content or pictures to details in the background, to using computer programs to manipulate those images to figure out other details that are hidden within them. And all of that just kind of leans on just being able to use computers and maybe having more of a technical approach to things.

Shaunagh Connaire:

So what you're doing now, it's a mix of traditional reporting and digital forensics, I guess. How hard was it to convince the New York Times to invest in something so new like this?

Malachy Browne:

It took a little bit of time. I come from two startups and where your role there is very clear, you can what you're contributing and you're building towards something as well. And then to find yourself in a huge organization, it takes a little time to kind of find your sea legs in a place like that. And I think there was maybe an expectation when I came in that I could bring the story for the model into the New York Times and revamp a particular unit. It doesn't work like that, you need to sort of have the reporters and the talent and build experience there in the midst of sort of changing strategy within the video units, as well as trying to move away from doing it in a particular way to a new way.

Malachy Browne:

So I think it took probably about a year before we realized that there was sort of a bigger opportunity out there to do more investigative work rather than just doing breaking news packages. Now, it was useful in 2016, there were any number of breaking news events and it was useful for that, but it took about a year. But I think once we dedicated time to it, that was all about creating time and space, any investigative journalist knows or journalists knows. And once we did that and we proved the value of it in two quick stories, then the higher ups called a meeting, very quickly, he said, "Explain the reporting, explain your process. Okay, we get it, what do you need to build this out?" And so it was kind of within two months.

Shaunagh Connaire:

So would you say then your Las Vegas report, was that a turning point for you guys in terms of how it was received by the audience? And you proved something quite spectacular there let's say.

Malachy Browne:

Yeah, I think that was the one that, outside of the Times and even within the Times, the broader newsroom got a lot of notice. And that video reconstructed what happened at the Las Vegas shooting, the worst mass shooting in modern American history. And the value in doing that was that the police were not releasing information about what happened. There were sort of conspiracy theories, swirling and police response was coming under scrutiny. And by collecting videos of that shooting, as often as it was people kind of kept recording and by comparing the audio signatures of each burst of fire, kind of, we ended up realizing we could reconstruct the whole event from start to finish in video. Sometimes from multiple different angles, so we could examine what was going on.

Malachy Browne:

And when you added layered on top of that the police scanner audio and layered on top of that the ambulance audio, you kind of got a deeper understanding of how the whole thing unfolded and what went on, where the gunman was firing at different times, sort of at the gaps in various different distractions either by the police or by the hotel staff that allowed concert goers time to get out of there and to flee where they were going to, where ambulances were staging. Our audience on site is primarily American and it was a major event and I think people first sort of recognized that as a visual investigation.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Amazing, and so what you're doing is so, so granular, reporting like that, I feel like, has never been done before. I think you even analyzed shadows, which sounds completely insane. Do you want to explain the types of tools you use Malachy and technology?

Malachy Browne:

It's premised in the idea that there is free information, if you like, out there on the open web and a lot of people call it online open source reporting, or OSINT if you search Twitter for that, you'll find all sorts of people doing it. That combined with more traditional journalism, like filing documents and interviewing sources, it can give you a trove of hard documentary evidence about an event, and a lot of it tends to be audio or visual in nature. And if you can kind of timestamp that, map it out for where it happened, you can examine sort of in time and space how different things unfolded. You can break down critical moments frame by frame and analyze them and see what was going on, what was going through people's minds by their reactions and things like that.

Malachy Browne:

And you can do it in a very low tech way just by using video editing and audio editing software to examine sound waves, or to just tap through videos or to colour correct videos and pull out extra details. And you can do it in high-tech ways as well, where you're creating 3D models and inserting the evidence into those models, reconstructing what's happening, examining say in a bomb site, the relationship of the debris or the scarring and walls from shrapnel to information that people told you about what was there. Like for instance, if bodies absorbed shrapnel, you have a shadow in the wall. And what I'm always trying to do is find, if there's an event that I'm investigating, I'm trying to find the first reports on social media or anywhere related to that event, because that gets you the witnesses who are reporting it.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It's really quite amazing, it's so new and it changes everything, doesn't it? Because you really can, as you and your team have proved, you can really hold people to account. Malachy, you and your team have done so many extraordinary investigations, as you mentioned, Las Vegas, chemical bombings in Syria, Gaza, that poor nurse being shot dead. Is there an investigation that you're most proud of?

Malachy Browne:

The Gaza one, I think the Gaza one probably for the tools that we used, and that was kind of the sort of highest bar in terms of forensic reconstruction that we've done. And it was purely experimental, we were chancing our arm and it was kind of merging a couple of different practices we had seen before.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It was, from memory, a 3D modelling that you used in that one?

Malachy Browne:

Yes.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Yeah, yeah, I can picture it.

Malachy Browne:

Yeah, the story there is that there was a medical [inaudible 00:12:40] and our team had interviewed her a couple of weeks before she was shot dead. And she was a medic who was volunteering during the protests of 2018 towards the South of Gaza. And she was out in the protest fields, there were videos of her kind of getting closer to the fence and warning shots being fired at her feet and those images kind of flashed across news media. And she became a kind of, almost a symbol of the seemingly liberal use of fire to police those protests that summer. And our challenge became, obviously we wanted to cover it and find out what happened, but the challenge kind of became, could we figure out where she was shot, and when and answer why she was shot as well, primarily, and if not shot was justified.

Malachy Browne:

And we had a good source network, we had stringers and Gaza who were going around collecting footage, but we went there as well. And that was critical because we found about 40 or 50 people who were on the protest field that day and we downloaded the content directly from their devices. And anytime you take a photograph or a record or a video on a device it's imprinted with a timestamp. And because we got those direct files, we could create a timeline of what happened and although we weren't there to bear witness that day, we were digitally bearing witness through all of this footage, some of which captured many of those critical moments from multiple different angles. And so our view wasn't really occluded and we captured, we actually had six videos of that critical moment unfolding as well.

Malachy Browne:

And what we also did while we were there with the permission of the IDF was we droned the area around Gaza that this happened, and the images happened to be so high definition that we could create a 3D model of using what's called photogrammetry. And then by just kind of sketching in details from the images like the position of the Jeeps and the sand berms and the soldiers, and then by placing the videos into the model and by triangulating each video against each other and against landmarks in the background we were able to freeze that moment in time and every person and where they were within that sort of critical line of fire and show that the nearest protestor was 140 yards from the snipers. And that sort of use of lethal force is justified when there's an imminent threat to life, and it clearly wasn't in that moment.

Malachy Browne:

And we got all sorts of other details as well. And being so specific kind of stood to us because when we went to the IDF to interview them about that, and we were given certain answers, we could challenge that or we could say, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense because of this." And we had far more specific detail than they even they had about what happened.

Shaunagh Connaire:

And what was their response when you showed them this [inaudible 00:15:51] evidence, surely they couldn't deny that the medic should not have been shot?

Malachy Browne:

Well, for the first time in that interview when they saw the evidence, they admitted that they had killed her, and so that was sort of a revelation in its own right. I think we had more information than they had about what had happened. They had already launched an internal inquiry, but after our interview they launched a criminal investigation as well. And that's unusual because of all the 5,000 people who were shot, several hundred were killed by that stage when we'd interviewed them. And they had, up until that point opened only two criminal inquiries so this was the third one, so it was a big step. And I think then after that we heard that the new commander of the IDF Forces out in Gaza said that they had adjusted their live fire policy subsequent to the investigation but we didn't get that officially.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That's extraordinary. So, I mean, you're talking about real impact off the back of your journalism, that must feel rather good because it often doesn't happen like that.

Malachy Browne:

Yeah, it does. I mean, what we were doing was diving into that one incident and then looking sort of broadly at other incidents that followed a similar pattern and see was there something to discern here? Or was it just a one off mistake? And anyway, it is involved all of that technical stuff, but also studying Supreme Court submissions in Israel made by the Israeli Defense Forces, talking to snipers, talking to former Israeli and US snipers, British snipers too And really trying to get an understanding of that, getting out onto the field itself so that we weren't making any assumptions about distances or what it looked like out there. We got permission to go right up close to the fence, all of that sort of stuff. So it was deeply, deeply reported as well as the sort of forensics, which gave us very specific detail.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Well, that was my next question actually because I know you did travel to Gaza for that particular investigation and with your other investigations, you don't often... I mean, you never really get to do that, do you? I wondered if that sometimes feels strange to be so far away from the people you're actually reporting on?

Malachy Browne:

Yeah. I mean, I think when you get there and you're talking to people in person, then you get a different sense of the story and so we've been trying to do that more and more. We managed to do it in a story we did in Afghanastan and Nigeria and on our doorstep here in New York, the killing of a kid in the Bronx. But it poses its own challenges stylistically then in how you want to tell the story, in sort of real specific and short punctuated detail or in a more doc style piece as well, which is more emotive. But, I don't know, there are pros and cons to both. But we're trying to get out a little bit more and get out into the field and introduce more cinematography, but also talking to the people who are experiencing these events firsthand.

Shaunagh Connaire:

And with your Syrian reporting, Malachy, which is also really well known, you and your team categorically exposed Russians bombing Syrian and hospitals and schools in a refugee camp. How did you do that? I think I read something about you somehow obtaining voice recordings from the Russian cockpit. I mean, how on earth did you even get that?

Malachy Browne:

It was clear to us in looking at what was going on in Idlib last year that hospitals were again being deliberately targeted as part of the military strategy. It had happened in Aleppo, it had happened in Douma, it happened in Idlib in 2017 before they abandoned that campaign, and other places around Syria as well. And we interviewed doctors, other medics, supporting organizations, we looked at data around the bombing of hospitals and other medical facilities in conjunction with those campaigns and at the start of those campaigns. And when you've got 500 incidents of hospitals being bombed, it's no accident. And the question then that our editor was pushing us to answer was, "Well, that's all fine and well, but who's doing it? Can we assign blame?"

Malachy Browne:

And usually you can do that by looking at weapons remains or looking at serial numbers that are imprinted on weapons fragments. But in this case we didn't have that and so we were, in talking to witnesses to one of the attacks, they said, "We know it's the Russians because A, we know their aircraft and B, we have them on audio doing it." And we discovered that there's a network of plane observers and spotters, they're watching the skies, they're watching airports, but they're also listening into the open radio communications between the ground control and the pilots in the sky, both for the Syrian Air Force and the Russians. And it's a bit like kind of the police scanner audio here in the States that people listen in, but somebody started recording it and timestamping the recordings and we found out who was doing that and they made those available to us. And that was a trove of really valuable data going back months.

Malachy Browne:

And so we got access to all of this stuff and we created a system to basically process it, it was coming in five to 10 second chunks, and so we had thousands of files to manage. And basically we had a list of the attacks that we had been investigating and we had rough times for the attacks, but our challenge became finding out the specific times down to the minute that those attacks happened, and then comparing what was happening on the ground or what was being recorded in the skies above at that time. And we were able to get very, identify individual pilots by their pilot numbers who were dropping a bomb, then circling back five minutes later, dropping a bomb on the same hospital, circling back again and doing it again and again.

Malachy Browne:

And we looked at May 5th, 2019 when they hit four underground hospitals, and in one case they shared the coordinates of the hospital in the minutes just before it was bombed. And we knew it was bombed at that time because we had an incident report, but then we'd collect video evidence directly from the witnesses and they have the timestamp in those video files. And it's never one piece of evidence that we'll rely on, but we'll stack all of the different pieces of evidence, get multiple videos if we can, CCTV that's recorded inside hospitals and you can see the hospitals shuttering with the force of the impact, all of that sort of stuff.

Malachy Browne:

And then we also got separately... The early warning system that they had over there automatically tweets out, "Plane spotted over Kafr Zita, it's heading South. Plane spotted over Maarat al-Numaan, it's heading West. Helicopter over Kafr Nabl and it's circling." And this is a warning system that once they enter it into their spreadsheet, it automatically tweets out. And so we knew that they weren't filling in this evidence retrospectively, it was actively doing it, it was an active early warning system for doctors and for others in hospitals and also rescue workers as well. And so that was another layer of evidence as well on top of that, as well as the witnesses who were there and the hospital managers, patients who were being treated. So it was a months long very detailed, but very forensic investigation that proved without a doubt that Russian pilots had committed some of the worst atrocities in Syria last year.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It's extraordinary. I mean, the layers of corroboration that you have to do. But I guess you obviously knew the coordinates of the hospital, and then if you heard a Russian pilot stating those exact coordinates, I'm sure that at that moment you were like, "We got them. Right, that's it."

Malachy Browne:

That's exactly what we said. Evan Hill, who was one of the central team members stood up from his desk, he got a text message from our Russian video editor who was translating. And he said, "I've got a bunch of coordinates that these guys are using." Evan comes back, checks the coordinates against the hospital that we have, stood up from his desk and he said, "We have them." We thought, "Oh, they're probably sharing the coordinates for all the other hospitals as well." They weren't, that was the only one that they shared that the coordinates for, but by other means and by establishing the minute of the other attacks, we are able to find out that they also were responsible. Yeah, anyways, horrifying but we got there, we got there.

Shaunagh Connaire:

You got there. Malachy, tell me during your time as a journalist, what has been the kind of the most crazy experience you've had?

Malachy Browne:

One that definitely is one that I remember is when we were in Gaza. And I just remember one evening we were interviewing one of the subjects, beautiful evening, it was close to sunset down by the waterfront, and it was just stunning. And it was around the time when these Great Return march protests, there had been weekly protests that were running every Friday, and lots of people have been injured and shot during those protests. And they had gone from being weekly to daily, and this was a Tuesday evening if I remember, and we just heard or [inaudible 00:26:14] got a message that 20 something people have been shot just up the road from where we were filming and were being taken to the nearby hospital.

Malachy Browne:

But we arrive at the hospital and it's absolutely carnage when you walk inside there. There's a lot of young men had been shot in the leg, I remember walking in behind friends who were using their arms as sort of seats to, to lift their buddy who had been shot in the lower leg through the corridors. Treatment in a side room, seeing a fellow who had been shot on top of his head, it hadn't got through his head, but grazed his head, but his friends were trying to prop him up and his head rolling around, eyes rolling back. Loads of other men who were there who had metal pins sticking out of their legs, their lower legs were there for treatments and to have their wounds cleaned, they were all just standing aside against the walls to let the traffic through. And just absolutely mayhem inside there and I heard a doctor saying, "Hey, you can't film inside here, but go down to the morgue."

Malachy Browne:

So we turned around and walked out of the hospital and basically follow the sound down the hill and we remember approaching a small square building. I heard dozens of people outside banging on these two metal doors in the middle of the building. And there were a few young men, early 20s who had been shot and killed just in the previous hour and a half or so, and we're inside there. And somehow Yousur Al-Hlou who was a producer, a camera woman on the job managed to squeeze right in through all these people who were bustling and jostling, trying to get in through these doors and the noise emanating from inside there is, again, just screams and shouts and roars. And convinces this big burly man who also had been shot, he was on crutches and slamming the door from the inside with his crutches to get in. And she said something to him, and he just kind of grabbed under my arm and the two of us duck in. And just inside there was a relative of one of the deceased who came in to identify and lots of friends who are there.

Malachy Browne:

And I remember just on the left hand side you had just the slabs where the bodies are kept and it being pulled over and just the place absolutely erupting and this poor young fellow had been shot in the neck and killed, and his friend swarming in around him and hugging him and kissing him. And anyway, it was very memorable, it stood out, but we wanted to try to follow the story. And so we said to the medics who were there, "When is the body going to be prepared? Could we capture this story and talk to the family?" And they said, "Yeah, sure, come back in the morning around seven o'clock and we'll be preparing the body and all of that."

Malachy Browne:

And in the meantime, so we go home, get up in the morning, come back and the top of the above the doorway has been bust in and the body has been taken because for whatever reason, the friends or the family wanted somebody else to take care of and prepare the body. And so we find out where the body has been taken to and it's taken to another morgue where he's laid out and friends are slowly coming in and neighbors and saying their goodbyes and farewells. And there's teenage boys who were neighbors of this guy, but I remember the whole thing, it's sort of... It was an example of the sadness and the anger and the hopelessness of that whole situation and the politicization of it.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Well, that is really interesting to hear about the politicization of that poor young guys death, but it was great that you did get to go to Gaza and carry out that really important investigation. But listen, Malachy, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks a million for coming on and look forward to catching up in person soon.

Shaunagh Connaire:

If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. And if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media at Shaunagh on Twitter or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it, until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.