We’ve reported on teenage prostitution fueled by demand from United Nations peacekeepers and the growing drug trade carried out by South American cartels smuggling cocaine through Africa into Europe. Our reporting on the health hazards of female genital cutting grabbed international attention when traditional leaders threatened to kill our reporter Mae Azango and her 9-year-old daughter. That story touched off urgent debates and forced the government and development organizations to act.

We’ve also exposed corruption. In a country with the dubious honor of being ranked atop Transparency International’s annual corruption rankings, chronicling graft is a daily task. It’s also a constant gamble for journalists. Our office was firebombed in October 2009, and I was jailed briefly for 36 hours in 2011.

And reporting on corruption inevitably leads to libel suits. No media outlet here has won a libel case since Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf came into office in 2006. This week we finally lost ours — most likely because we recently exposed a secret deal between members of the Liberian government and the corrupt regime in Equatorial Guinea to make a $130 million investment in an airport.

The libel case that landed me in jail began in 2010, when we published the results of two investigations by the General Auditing Commission, Liberia’s independent corruption watchdog, into the Agriculture Ministry’s accounts. The investigations, which Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf ordered, found nearly $6 million unaccounted for and raised questions about the agriculture minister at the time, Christopher Toe, a former president of the American online university Strayer.

When Mr. Toe was quietly dismissed from government, he reacted by suing the paper for libel, as well as me and the reporter Samwah Fallah in our personal capacities. Mr. Toe’s defense was that he’d never been prosecuted and therefore could not be at fault. Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf has dismissed but not prosecuted many of the government members identified by the corruption watchdog, because, she has said, she does not believe Liberia’s broken criminal justice system is ready to render a fair verdict. But a civil court eventually found in favor of Mr. Toe, which was no surprise because two jurors admitted to us that they had been paid to find us guilty.