Every investigation begins with a question and a trace. In modern politics, the trace is often digital: a post that vanishes, a geotag that survives, a chunk of metadata that remains despite a platform’s best efforts to scrub it away.
What matters is not merely the trace itself, but the way it can be assembled into a narrative that withstands scrutiny. Public accountability depends on that labor: connecting fragments, validating claims, and preserving context before the platform changes its design or the source disappears.
Investigative journalism is therefore not just about finding evidence. It is about protecting the conditions under which evidence can retain meaning over time.