Whoever said that good old-fashioned journalism was dead and gone? Whoever said that in the Internet age newspapers were obsolete? Whoever said that investigative reporting was a thing of the past?

Whoever did, forgot to check with the Executive Editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson.

Under her editorship, investigative reporting has distinguished the New York Times and served as reminder of how much we need great papers. Seems every month someone at the Times crafts another piece of reporting that is hard-nosed and hard won. Take, for example, the series on Wal-Mart in China, or on the business of horseracing, or, as previously mentioned, on Foxconn. (See blog titled, “The Promise of Good Followership – Apple Ripens.”) They each required on the part of the paper a major investment of time and money. Over many months, sources had to be collected and confirmed, and facts had to be checked and rechecked.

In a speech she delivered last June, Abramson reaffirmed the importance of investigative reporting – and warned of a crackdown on those who leak government secrets. Ironically, given his reputation as a liberal democrat, Barack Obama or, at least, members of his administration, have been especially keen to prosecute those who make overt what the White House wants kept covert. Remember what became of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with aiding and abetting Julian Assange? In her speech, Abramson went so far as to say that “the environment in Washington has never been more hostile to report in.”

All the more reason to applaud the Times for regularly investing in investigative journalism. In order for the relatively powerless to hold to account the relatively powerful, they need to be armed with information that is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to what the Internet is likely to yield.

• Fed – Up Follower of the Year: Malala Yousafzai

The more I read about her, the more I conclude that in the beginning she was only an arrow in her father’s quiver. He used her, even as a girl, to further his own activist agenda. Still, the impression from a distance is that over time, as she transitioned from childhood to adolescence, his agenda became hers. By the time the Taliban shot and gravely wounded Malala – on a school bus no less – she had come herself deeply to believe that Pakistani girls should have access to education as do Pakistani boys.

This is the cause that she has championed for years, though even now she is only 15. And this is the cause that nearly got her killed. But, the attempted assassination made her a martyr. She has become a worldwide symbol of daring to speak truth to power, of daring to stand up and be counted while most of the rest stay silent. Malala Yousafzai is a fed-up follower bold enough and brave enough to take on leaders too frightened or hide-bound themselves to create change. Without any obvious sources of power, authority, or influence, she has, notwithstanding her tender age, left an imprint that will long endure.

• Lame Leader of the Year: Bashar al-Assad

“Lame” does not quite capture the President of Syria – “lousy” or even “lethal” is better.

For many months now most of the experts have been predicting Assad’s imminent departure – or his immanent demise. It has been thought unlikely or even impossible that he could survive for any length of time the increasingly impassioned and widespread rebellion against his rule. Well, the experts were wrong. Thanks to, among others, his patron Putin, he remains in harness, clinging to power as his country collapses around him.

The effort to negotiate Assad’s exit continue (with Putin perhaps playing a more constructive role). But the costs of our collective helplessness and haplessness have been high. Since the rebellion, now a full-fledged civil war, started, tens of thousands have been killed and injured and hundreds of thousands more have fled into exile or been another way dislocated. Moreover given the suffering on all sides, while Assad’s own future is not in doubt (he will at some point go), Syria’s is fraught with peril.

I am among the many millions worldwide who have watched and waited for Assad to fall. But here he is still standing – nearly two years after the protests against him and his regime began in earnest. He is living testimony to one of humankind’s most dreadful dilemmas: how to respond when a bad leader is willing to do whatever it takes to hold on.

On January 25, 2012, the New York Times published the first of a two-part series headlined, “In China, Human Costs are Built Into an iPad.” The articles were landmark investigative journalism.

Before they were published, it seemed no one had thought much about how Apple’s iconic line of products was actually made. Instead, they simply appeared on a regular basis, almost like magic, emanations from the fervid, fervent brain of singular Steve Jobs. However, once the information contained in the Times became public knowledge, our collective disinterest came to a crashing halt.

The Times minced no words in disclosing Apple’s reprehensible labor practices. (Need I add that technology companies other than Apple, such as Dell, for example, and Hewlett-Packard, were no better?) Here is an excerpt from the Times’ original piece.

“Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records….More troubling [advocacy groups] say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories… killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions….”

The Times story broke not long after Jobs’ death, and the succession as CEO of Tim Cook. His initial response to the expose was to play defense, insisting the charges against Apple were “patently false and offensive.” Still, he did go on to say that the company would not turn a blind eye to whatever any problems, adding that “on this you have my word.”

Cook was as good as his word – if only because the media and the public held his feet to the fire. The Times had uncovered the blatant disparity between Apple’s shiny new products, and the wretched conditions under which they were made. So this was a story that had legs. Within a month after the series saw the light of day, Cook took his first conciliatory step: he requested that the Fair Labor Association audit Apple’s labor practices.

Less than one year after the original Times piece came out, there was a second front page story on Apple. This one was published on December 27 under the headline, “Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronic Factories in China.” The article describes how during the last several months high ranking Apple executives had become directly and deeply involved in how Apple products are made. As a result, the company publicly committed itself to several wide-ranging reforms, including curtailing workers’ hours and increasing their wages. Moreover the changes within Apple extend to California, where the company is based. In the last year, Apple has “tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.”

What explains this dramatic change? It was not that Tim Cook – not to speak of his predecessor Steve Jobs – woke up one morning saying, “Golly, gee, I’ve seen the light! Apple has to be nicer and kinder and more generous to those in its employ!” Hardly. Rather it was first and foremost the Times’ expose – an invaluable reminder of how vital to a healthy society is investigative journalism. Second it was the public response to what the Times had disclosed. The revelations regarding Apple did not fall on deaf hears. Rather they spoke to ordinary people, who were coming to conclude it was dishonorable to delight in a device manufactured under conditions described as Dickensian.

Once word got out about Apple – it got to the point of being skewered on “Saturday Night Live” – the downside risk was so great there was no choice. There was no choice for Apple’s leaders but to follow Apple’s followers.

She died last night. The woman who was brutally gang-raped on a bus in India, finally succumbed to injuries sustained in the attack.

Her death will trigger more public protests. But the ferocity of the attack has already inflamed people across India, normally inured to assaults against women.

The government was actually taken aback by the riots, surprised that what it at first considered no more than yet another rape case, should trigger such widespread public outrage. But this was different – this was a single case that was so obviously heinous a crime it could not be ignored. It could not be ignored even in a country in which violence against women is commonplace.

As a result of rioting that was larger and lasted longer than anyone originally anticipated, the government agreed to establish a commission to investigate the situation. But, whether this incident will lead to real change – as opposed merely to apparent change – depends only on one thing. It depends on followers continuing to press leaders finally to take meaningful action, not only in the courts, but in homes and schools and in every other institution in addition. What is required here is a cultural shift, which is never accomplished from the top down, only from the bottom up. .

It seems to me so apparent that Washington is suffering from a crisis of bad followership – as opposed to bad leadership – I wonder that no one sees it as I do. (Though I do know the reason – we’re leader-centric. We’re so fixated on leaders we scarcely notice followers.)

Once again the evidence is compelling. In just the last week both Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Barack Obama have again been diminished by followers refusing to follow. The inability of the Congress and the Executive to avert the threat of the fiscal cliff in a judicious and timely manner testifies less to the weaknesses of the speaker and the president, than to the recalcitrance of legislators who simply refuse to compromise, as if compromise was weakness. It’s all about the inability of the governing class to go along to get along – to follow someone else’s lead when to follow someone else’s lead is necessary to the greater good. Put differently, what’s happened this month in DC is not so much about individual leaders falling down on the job, as it is about a political cadre that dreads following and so insists on leading or, at least, tries to.

Not incidentally, the same syndrome surfaced as soon as the president started to name his new cabinet. Two of his trial balloons were shot down with a ferocity and alacrity that threw into question the administration’s ability to manage its own affairs. Both Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel were the president’s preferences, she for Secretary of State, he for Secretary of Defense. Instead of a deliberate approval process, we had, in both cases, a bit of a fiasco, in which Rice and Hagel were hit by brickbats thrown from every direction, demeaning not only them, but the man who wanted them as members of his team.

Whether or not Rice and Hagel would have made good appointments is not here the question. Nor is whether or not it was smart for the Obama administration to float their names in such a target-rich environment. Rather what I am pointing to is the free-for- all that now passes for business as usual in Washington. When everyone wants to play the part of leader, and no one is willing to play the part of follower, the unhappy result is an unholy mess.

We are taught that one of Lincoln’s countless virtues was his patience. “Look to Lincoln for how to lead,” we are instructed. Go see Spielberg’s hit film “Lincoln” – and you too will see evidence of how politically advantageous is limitless patience.

But that was then – and this is now. The second decade of the 21st century is radically different from the seventh decade of the 19th. This is an era in which events seemingly move at warp speed, when technology governs communication and dissemination of information, when the rush to judgment is more hasty than before, and when leaders have less power and influence and followers more. The task of getting political work done – for example, of drafting a new law and getting it passed – is therefore different, more onerous, than it was 150 years earlier.

In the last several weeks have been two catastrophes – one at home, the other abroad – both of which demand remedial action. The first was the massacre (26 died) in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; the second was the fatal fire (112 died) at a garment factory in Bangladesh. In both cases disaster was followed by an outcry. In the U. S. were immediate calls for change ranging from new gun control laws lo greater national attention to mental health. In Bangladesh was an immediate government inquiry, charging “unpardonable negligence” and demanding new public sector controls over private sector enterprises.

The presumption is that a leader like Lincoln would, even under these circumstances, counsel patience . But the question is whether in this day and age patience is the political virtue that it is said to have been at an earlier time. It could be that circumstances now dictate just the opposite. It could be that unless leaders and followers press the issue in the immediate wake of disaster, the opposition will harden and the moment for change will have come and then gone.

By curious coincidence investigations into two recent scandals – one in England, one in the U.S. – found that those in charge were sorely lacking. It’s similarly a coincidence that those in charge got away with a slap on the wrist at most.

In the Jimmy Savile sex abuse case, “rigid management chains” reportedly left the British Broadcasting Corporation “completely incapable” of dealing with the recent crisis that tarnished the network. There was no charge of a cover-up. But the report did describe a “chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Not good.

Yet the price paid by the BBC’s senior executives for their “disastrous” mismanagement was minimal to nonexistent. Some got off the hook completely, while others resigned or were reassigned, none seriously suffering, certainly not financially. In response to charges in some quarters that such meager punishments did not fit the crime, the CEO of the BBC trust told an interviewer that while management problems had to be addressed, they did not call for “putting heads on spikes.”

As the result of an independent report that criticized the “grossly inadequate” security in Benghazi, where four Americans were killed on September 11, four State Department officials were removed from their posts. They were charged with a “lack of proactive leadership” and a “lack of ownership of Benghazi’s security issues.” However, for reasons that escape me entirely, the report did not criticize more senior officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Patrick Kennedy, the Under Secretary for management. So they, like their senior counterparts at the BBC, have not so far had to pay any obvious price for falling down on the job.

Funny, I seem to remember learning about leadership that those at the top are ultimately responsible. When things go well, they get the credit. When things go badly, they get, or they take, the blame. Maybe I remember wrong.