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Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism

230 points by tysone 11y ago

sna1l 11y ago
As an aside, I'm surprised tax code simplification isn't a bigger issue in this current US presidential election. Apple and Google hold billions of dollars outside of the US in order to pay lower taxes. I would have thought more people would be looking for solutions to this common problem.
- olegious 11y ago
  Tax policy is not something John Public understands. It is much easier to discuss, focus on and sell sound bites.
  - sandebert 11y ago
    Also known as bike-shedding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- cordite 11y ago
  Simplification would mean that some people pay more, some people pay less, but if people are told they will have to pay more by an opponent to simplification, then they will likely join that opponent. There is very little critical thinking among the peoples these days, and I fear that sets us on a dangerous societal path.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    People would be fine with paying more, as long as the more is less than what they spend on avoidance now.
- bendykstra 11y ago
  The problem demands a technocratic answer, but it's an emotional issue. Candidates could endorse incentives for companies to pay more tax (Clinton has, quietly[1]), but that would not satisfy voters who want to see companies shamed and punished. [1] http://www.alternet.org/hillary-clintons-plush-life-corporate-lecture-circuit http://www.alternet.org/hillary-clintons-plush-life-corporat...
- rhizome 11y ago
  Probably has something to do with "tax simplification" always getting hijacked by estate and capital gains tax goons.
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  I don't see how the money held outside the US is connected to tax code simplification. If anything, taxing that money would make the tax code more complicated, not less complicated.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    The main issue is it would be taxed too highly if it were brought back, thus it's held outside.
  - sna1l 11y ago
    My thought: More complicated tax code --> More loopholes, so Less complicated tax code --> Less loopholes. But I'm not tax expert by any means.
  - devishard 11y ago
    It might be complicated to tax that money, but if we simplified tax code there would be fewer complicated ways in which people can legally get the money offshore in the first place. Tax simplification is a prevention, not a cure.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      It wouldn't help in the mentioned cases, though - the money was received offshore in the first, it didn't "go" there.
      - lijason 11y ago
        Is that true? I'm not an accountant, but I thought a lot of companies do things like give ownership of a technology to a foreign subsidiary and then have their US operation "license" that technology at high cost to move profits overseas as well. Maybe that loophole was closed though?
  - tomschlick 11y ago
    The general idea is that those companies would like to bring that money back to fund various things. They can't without getting hit with a high tax rate so they keep it outside. If we simplified the tax code it would help curb the max exodus of that money and if we had a lower rate they would bring that money back in.
- ams6110 11y ago
  One of the candidates still in contention has as one of his feature agenda items to simplify the tax code and eliminate the IRS "as we know it."
  - sna1l 11y ago
    If you are talking about Ted Cruz, I think his idea is a little too simple.
- valgaze 11y ago
  Not to beat a dead horse, but not-so-shockingly a certain enormous software firm that happens to tax prep software was opposed to simplification too: * http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4150900/intuit-lobbies-against-returns-free-tax-filing-system http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4150900/intuit-lobbies-aga... * http://theweek.com/articles/466220/why-turbotax-tried-make-taxes-more-complicated http://theweek.com/articles/466220/why-turbotax-tried-make-t... * https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    This is a tangential issue (consumer vs corporate tax), but the US tax system is beyond ridiculous. In the socialist democracy where I live, doing my taxes is literally a no-op. It just fixes itself (with a possibility for me to submit correct numbers if the govt. calculated ones are wrong.)
    - cmurf 11y ago
      If you think U.S. personal taxes are ridiculous (and they are), consider small business taxes. The Schedule C drags in all kinds of craziness, many worksheets don't even get filed but you have to do them to get the number on the form right. And then 1120S? That was the form I gave up on and hired a CPA.
      - Pluizer 11y ago
        I need S-expressions to parse question 8 on that form.
    - robbiep 11y ago
      Agreed - why they don't use a PAYG/PAYE system is crazy.
  - rglullis 11y ago
    Living in Germany now, I think things in the US are actually better than here. All years I lived in the US I paid less than $50 and was done with the thing in a couple of hours. In Germany, not only the tax code is complicated, you MUST go through a Steuerberater. There are some associations that can help you if you don't have any property and have a contract job (angestellt). And it still costs more in time and money than just buying TurboTax. It's incredible to think that Brazil has managed, despite all of the backwards mentality when dealing with bureaucracy, actually manages to be the best example I can give of dealing with taxes: the Brazilian IRS provides a free Java-based tool that is reasonably easy to use.
- nihonde 11y ago
  "...hold billions of dollars outside of the US in order to pay lower taxes." You might also say that they elect to keep money earned outside the US away from the US tax code because they have a duty to their shareholders to minimize their exposure to taxes in general.
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    What's your point ? Are you saying they are morally right to avoid taxes or shifting the blame to the shareholders ? (I seem to recall Google avoided paying taxes in the UK on benefits made in the UK by transferring the money elsewhere).
    - vixen99 11y ago
      Of course people are morally right to avoid taxes! Only an idiot would act otherwise. You simply organize your affairs so that you comply with the fiscal rules and "No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue" -- Lord Clyde in the case of Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929] As to the objection to low tax locations: 'It’s pure tax protectionism: governments don’t produce widgets, so they are all in favour of free trade in widgets; but they do produce taxes, so they want to keep out the competition. Low-tax jurisdictions act as a safety valve that makes it harder for politicians to oppress their citizens with crippling taxes'. Eamonn Butler: http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ In the EU, merely trying not to buy goods subject to VAT is a tax avoidance measure!
      - johnchristopher 11y ago
        > Of course people are morally right to avoid taxes! That's a major postulate. Especially regarding the morality of it and the practicality. Frankly that's another debate and I think we can already agree to disagree. I'll point out that Google is not people though and the mass of money being evaded that way can't be justified in the eyes of the people down the social ladder who are told to buckle up their seat belt once again because the 'conomy is crashing again and they are going to need to make sacrifices to save banks (again).
kobayashi 11y ago
I'm unconvinced by the main argument of the article - that the Panama Papers signal a shift (perhaps paradigmatic?) in mainstream journalism. Yes, the PP leaks are different than Wikileaks, and yes, the ICIJ reporting/investigation is different than most other cases of investigative journalism, but one outlier doesn't a shift make. Simultaneously, the article does bring up some thought-provoking points, like the need by journalists to consider how they may be strategically used by leakers of data for their own ends. But that's not really a new consideration for journalists, either. Granted, the article's author is unlikely to have titled the piece, so perhaps the author would assert that the article wasn't trying to make the argument defined by the title. Yet, all in all, I found the article to be sometimes interesting but ultimately unpersuasive.
- Synaesthesia 11y ago
  I agree, I certainly hope it will wake a lot of people up and spur on a new wave of investigative journalism, but to say that it's already changed things is premature.
- Fargren 11y ago
  I really hope the name "PP leaks" does not catch on.
  - kobayashi 11y ago
    lol, good point
danso 11y ago
I don't have many quibbles with the rest of the piece, but not sure what the "shift in mainstream journalism" referred to in the headline is. That journalists would break big stories using suspiciously obtained data and documents? They've been doing that well before Snowden and Assange became famous. What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that in any of their previous leak investigations...nor has any other mainstream organization done that with leaked information (e.g. Guardian with the Snowden documents). However, you do see a lot more news organizations putting up the data/documents that they legally obtained for public inspection...a recent example that was on todays' frontpage is BuzzFeed News's repos: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews However, the "shift" that I do see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data/document dump, something made possible by today's technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This "distributed investigation" paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.
- thepangolino 11y ago
  >What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. The so called mass/mainstream media never seems to share links when reporting about new laws being passed or new studies being published.
  - danso 11y ago
    > This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. I don't think reporters and news orgs go out of their way to "shield" people from source material when it is publicly available and relatively easy to link to. For example, there's DocumentCloud [1] (from which Backbone and Underscore came out of) is a news project that started out as a project collaboration between New York Times and ProPublica...think of it as Scribd, except free for news orgs, and geared towards open access and making source documents more visible. That said, there are plenty of times when news orgs should be linking but don't...but a lot of that is out of carelessness, CMS limitations, and/or incompetence -- from various angles. For example, some government websites do not have direct URLs (that don't require some kind of cookie to be set)...such as the individual documents in this U.S. Senate Financial Disclosures database [2]. Ideally, a journalist could figure a way around it, or hand assemble the scanned pages (which are stored as GIFs)...but that's a lot of production work to ask from people who typically have almost zero web production skills beyond knowing how to use a browser. Then there's the classic case of Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world, having a CMS that wasn't designed to incorporate hyperlinks (among other HTML features I imagine) [3] A lot of tech savvy news orgs these days will upload raw data dumps to their S3 servers. And some even create news applications around that data to make it more accessible. One controversial example that comes to mind is when the LA Times fought to get teacher ratings data and then built an online database, which included their value-added interpretation. Teacher ratings are extremely controversial, nevermind any proposition to do value-adding, and the LA Times critics went so far as to blame a teacher's suicide on their database [4] Those teacher scores were public records. While not everyone agrees with how the LAT chose to augment them [5], they did show the raw data for each teacher. If the LAT faced such pushback from the government in just getting the records, and then such outcry from the teachers unions when they published those records, for public records...then I imagine the pushback against a news org that publishes a data dump of illegally obtained private data is going to be quite harsh. In the Panama Papers scenario, it seems that most of the records deal with private persons, many of whom aren't interesting to the public and who are too numerous for the journalists to do individual checkups on. And what they're doing is not illegal. So the ICIJ has made the right moral call, IMO, in not just throwing everything out there. [1] https://www.documentcloud.org/featured https://www.documentcloud.org/featured [2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ [3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/reuters-gutting-web-infrastructure-reuters-next-its-big-online-retooli http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html [5] http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/ http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/
swalsh 11y ago
The NYTimes was not "privileged" enough to have been a part of this new leak. To me this is them displaying their sour grapes. I also don't believe it was any accident they were not a part of the leaks. This is not the same paper that published the Watergate burglary.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  considering they readily print unconfirmed government propaganda from "anonymous sources", its not surprising. Look how hard they cheer-led Iraq II and an anticipated attack on Iran.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > Look how hard they cheer-led Iraq II and an anticipated attack on Iran. For a newspaper that's otherwise pretty progressive on other societal issues, I wonder if it makes any sense for them to be pro-war and all.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      I think you're mistaking a distinct strain of upper class liberalism including a strong neoliberalism for progressivism. Plus an oft servile relationship to power.
    - mafribe 11y ago
      The US upper class tends to be liberal on social issues (e.g. gay marriage), but hawkish on foreign policy, especially as regards the middle east. Media content aligns with the political views of media owners. You can see this clearly at work now when 'progressive' US companies threaten to boycott North Carolina over a ridiculously minor issue to do with who should use what kind of toilet, but are happily trading with Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most repressive regimes. Adding 2 and 2 together gives an indication why the NYT, like most other US mainstream media, cheerled the second Iraq war.
      - greglindahl 11y ago
venomsnake 11y ago
The greatest shift is the incredibly good opsec that the organizations and journalists keep. It is a wonder.
- chopin 11y ago
  Against us ordinary people, yes. Against nation-state attackers I am not so sure. From which would you conclude that? I am pretty underwhelmed by the disclosures so far. Aside from Cameron nobody powerful in the western world has been hit. The majority in political power are those opposed to US or EU interest.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    Just wait. They are laying the trap now.
nbevans 11y ago
It's annoying the media has not even focused on the cyberattack element in all this. The theft and circulation of private legal data.
- tajen 11y ago
  Protecting their source?
rorykoehler 11y ago
This will be the most underwhelming leak unless the full leak database is released. Otherwise it just stinks of a political power play. I would argue that instead of signalling a shift in mainstream journalism it signals a shift in cyber warfare tactics/strategy.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
The elephant in the room (for the past, I dunno, half century? century? something like that) is that in the 20th century the news media transitioned from being largely allied with the public at large and substantially working class folks to being entirely a part of the "establishment" and being dominated by elite, upper class perspectives. The media just does not do hard hitting investigative journalism any more, as a rule.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8... I think they are just losing the veneer.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  What would you expect when the top tier newspapers only hire Ivy leaguers?
- Loughla 11y ago
  The easiest way to see this split, if you're ever trying to explain it to people, is to point to movie reviewers. It's the simplest version. Movie reviewers over the past few years have been off-step with major movie consumers. They've missed the mark on many movies (Deadpool and the new superman/batman movie are the most recent examples). This isn't because the reviewers' tastes are inherently better than the unwashed masses (although they would have you believe that). It's because they're elite, upper-class individuals, or at least they live that lifestyle. They're 'rich' folk who are unconnected with what John Q. Public really is into. It's a super simplification, but it's valid.
- CM30 11y ago
  Exhibit A, the gaming media. Note how many of the people involved are from upper class families with large trust funds and a tendency to get everything they say printed by almost anyone else in the industry. But either way, this is why the public has lost so much trust in the media. With a few exceptions here and there, they basically just serve powerful interests and try and shut down any independent attempts at social change. Part of it might be wages, average journalist wages aren't particularly high at the moment (especially not in less mainstream fields). So they tend to only be liveable for people with pre existing wealth and networks.
vnchr 11y ago
Maybe rather than a shift, it's a divergence. The Panama Papers represent classic journalistic values. It's what we want to expect: the truth uncovered. It's been a stark contrast to see news outlets blatantly ignore the Panama Papers, representing a very different set of values. Online discourse has provided a means for a growing portion of the population to see the difference and make their own choice.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  While the Panama Papers have been leaking away, the MSM have either made no mention at all of the Unaoil bribery scandal, or have pushed it far away from the front page. It's quite hard to find these stories without a direct link: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-trusted-middleman-for-oil-firm-involved-in-bribes-inquiry http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-t... http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-monaco-raid-oil-firm-unaoil-hq-corruption-investigation http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-... Maybe those classic journalistic values believe that allegations of the comprehensive corruption of the oil industry just isn't all that interesting as a story.
lunchTime42 11y ago
We allready sold out to the advertisement industry, the military sector and everyone with a double trigit bankaccount. So feed and caress us mighty invisible hand, or we shall bite you, for we know all your secrets? Journalism ala Mafia? That is the future? Can i have Wikileaks back please? I rather prefer people not in it for the gains.

230 points by tysone 11y ago

sna1l 11y ago

As an aside, I'm surprised tax code simplification isn't a bigger issue in this current US presidential election. Apple and Google hold billions of dollars outside of the US in order to pay lower taxes. I would have thought more people would be looking for solutions to this common problem.

olegious 11y ago
Tax policy is not something John Public understands. It is much easier to discuss, focus on and sell sound bites.
- sandebert 11y ago
  Also known as bike-shedding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
cordite 11y ago
Simplification would mean that some people pay more, some people pay less, but if people are told they will have to pay more by an opponent to simplification, then they will likely join that opponent. There is very little critical thinking among the peoples these days, and I fear that sets us on a dangerous societal path.
- ams6110 11y ago
  People would be fine with paying more, as long as the more is less than what they spend on avoidance now.
bendykstra 11y ago
The problem demands a technocratic answer, but it's an emotional issue. Candidates could endorse incentives for companies to pay more tax (Clinton has, quietly[1]), but that would not satisfy voters who want to see companies shamed and punished. [1] http://www.alternet.org/hillary-clintons-plush-life-corporate-lecture-circuit http://www.alternet.org/hillary-clintons-plush-life-corporat...
rhizome 11y ago
Probably has something to do with "tax simplification" always getting hijacked by estate and capital gains tax goons.
dietrichepp 11y ago
I don't see how the money held outside the US is connected to tax code simplification. If anything, taxing that money would make the tax code more complicated, not less complicated.
- ams6110 11y ago
  The main issue is it would be taxed too highly if it were brought back, thus it's held outside.
- sna1l 11y ago
  My thought: More complicated tax code --> More loopholes, so Less complicated tax code --> Less loopholes. But I'm not tax expert by any means.
- devishard 11y ago
  It might be complicated to tax that money, but if we simplified tax code there would be fewer complicated ways in which people can legally get the money offshore in the first place. Tax simplification is a prevention, not a cure.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    It wouldn't help in the mentioned cases, though - the money was received offshore in the first, it didn't "go" there.
    - lijason 11y ago
      Is that true? I'm not an accountant, but I thought a lot of companies do things like give ownership of a technology to a foreign subsidiary and then have their US operation "license" that technology at high cost to move profits overseas as well. Maybe that loophole was closed though?
- tomschlick 11y ago
  The general idea is that those companies would like to bring that money back to fund various things. They can't without getting hit with a high tax rate so they keep it outside. If we simplified the tax code it would help curb the max exodus of that money and if we had a lower rate they would bring that money back in.
ams6110 11y ago
One of the candidates still in contention has as one of his feature agenda items to simplify the tax code and eliminate the IRS "as we know it."
- sna1l 11y ago
  If you are talking about Ted Cruz, I think his idea is a little too simple.
valgaze 11y ago
Not to beat a dead horse, but not-so-shockingly a certain enormous software firm that happens to tax prep software was opposed to simplification too: * http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4150900/intuit-lobbies-against-returns-free-tax-filing-system http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4150900/intuit-lobbies-aga... * http://theweek.com/articles/466220/why-turbotax-tried-make-taxes-more-complicated http://theweek.com/articles/466220/why-turbotax-tried-make-t... * https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  This is a tangential issue (consumer vs corporate tax), but the US tax system is beyond ridiculous. In the socialist democracy where I live, doing my taxes is literally a no-op. It just fixes itself (with a possibility for me to submit correct numbers if the govt. calculated ones are wrong.)
  - cmurf 11y ago
    If you think U.S. personal taxes are ridiculous (and they are), consider small business taxes. The Schedule C drags in all kinds of craziness, many worksheets don't even get filed but you have to do them to get the number on the form right. And then 1120S? That was the form I gave up on and hired a CPA.
    - Pluizer 11y ago
      I need S-expressions to parse question 8 on that form.
  - robbiep 11y ago
    Agreed - why they don't use a PAYG/PAYE system is crazy.
- rglullis 11y ago
  Living in Germany now, I think things in the US are actually better than here. All years I lived in the US I paid less than $50 and was done with the thing in a couple of hours. In Germany, not only the tax code is complicated, you MUST go through a Steuerberater. There are some associations that can help you if you don't have any property and have a contract job (angestellt). And it still costs more in time and money than just buying TurboTax. It's incredible to think that Brazil has managed, despite all of the backwards mentality when dealing with bureaucracy, actually manages to be the best example I can give of dealing with taxes: the Brazilian IRS provides a free Java-based tool that is reasonably easy to use.
nihonde 11y ago
"...hold billions of dollars outside of the US in order to pay lower taxes." You might also say that they elect to keep money earned outside the US away from the US tax code because they have a duty to their shareholders to minimize their exposure to taxes in general.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  What's your point ? Are you saying they are morally right to avoid taxes or shifting the blame to the shareholders ? (I seem to recall Google avoided paying taxes in the UK on benefits made in the UK by transferring the money elsewhere).
  - vixen99 11y ago
    Of course people are morally right to avoid taxes! Only an idiot would act otherwise. You simply organize your affairs so that you comply with the fiscal rules and "No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue" -- Lord Clyde in the case of Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929] As to the objection to low tax locations: 'It’s pure tax protectionism: governments don’t produce widgets, so they are all in favour of free trade in widgets; but they do produce taxes, so they want to keep out the competition. Low-tax jurisdictions act as a safety valve that makes it harder for politicians to oppress their citizens with crippling taxes'. Eamonn Butler: http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ In the EU, merely trying not to buy goods subject to VAT is a tax avoidance measure!
    - johnchristopher 11y ago
      > Of course people are morally right to avoid taxes! That's a major postulate. Especially regarding the morality of it and the practicality. Frankly that's another debate and I think we can already agree to disagree. I'll point out that Google is not people though and the mass of money being evaded that way can't be justified in the eyes of the people down the social ladder who are told to buckle up their seat belt once again because the 'conomy is crashing again and they are going to need to make sacrifices to save banks (again).

kobayashi 11y ago

I'm unconvinced by the main argument of the article - that the Panama Papers signal a shift (perhaps paradigmatic?) in mainstream journalism. Yes, the PP leaks are different than Wikileaks, and yes, the ICIJ reporting/investigation is different than most other cases of investigative journalism, but one outlier doesn't a shift make. Simultaneously, the article does bring up some thought-provoking points, like the need by journalists to consider how they may be strategically used by leakers of data for their own ends. But that's not really a new consideration for journalists, either. Granted, the article's author is unlikely to have titled the piece, so perhaps the author would assert that the article wasn't trying to make the argument defined by the title. Yet, all in all, I found the article to be sometimes interesting but ultimately unpersuasive.

Synaesthesia 11y ago
I agree, I certainly hope it will wake a lot of people up and spur on a new wave of investigative journalism, but to say that it's already changed things is premature.
Fargren 11y ago
I really hope the name "PP leaks" does not catch on.
- kobayashi 11y ago
  lol, good point

danso 11y ago

I don't have many quibbles with the rest of the piece, but not sure what the "shift in mainstream journalism" referred to in the headline is. That journalists would break big stories using suspiciously obtained data and documents? They've been doing that well before Snowden and Assange became famous. What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that in any of their previous leak investigations...nor has any other mainstream organization done that with leaked information (e.g. Guardian with the Snowden documents). However, you do see a lot more news organizations putting up the data/documents that they legally obtained for public inspection...a recent example that was on todays' frontpage is BuzzFeed News's repos: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews However, the "shift" that I do see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data/document dump, something made possible by today's technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This "distributed investigation" paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.

thepangolino 11y ago
>What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. The so called mass/mainstream media never seems to share links when reporting about new laws being passed or new studies being published.
- danso 11y ago
  > This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. I don't think reporters and news orgs go out of their way to "shield" people from source material when it is publicly available and relatively easy to link to. For example, there's DocumentCloud [1] (from which Backbone and Underscore came out of) is a news project that started out as a project collaboration between New York Times and ProPublica...think of it as Scribd, except free for news orgs, and geared towards open access and making source documents more visible. That said, there are plenty of times when news orgs should be linking but don't...but a lot of that is out of carelessness, CMS limitations, and/or incompetence -- from various angles. For example, some government websites do not have direct URLs (that don't require some kind of cookie to be set)...such as the individual documents in this U.S. Senate Financial Disclosures database [2]. Ideally, a journalist could figure a way around it, or hand assemble the scanned pages (which are stored as GIFs)...but that's a lot of production work to ask from people who typically have almost zero web production skills beyond knowing how to use a browser. Then there's the classic case of Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world, having a CMS that wasn't designed to incorporate hyperlinks (among other HTML features I imagine) [3] A lot of tech savvy news orgs these days will upload raw data dumps to their S3 servers. And some even create news applications around that data to make it more accessible. One controversial example that comes to mind is when the LA Times fought to get teacher ratings data and then built an online database, which included their value-added interpretation. Teacher ratings are extremely controversial, nevermind any proposition to do value-adding, and the LA Times critics went so far as to blame a teacher's suicide on their database [4] Those teacher scores were public records. While not everyone agrees with how the LAT chose to augment them [5], they did show the raw data for each teacher. If the LAT faced such pushback from the government in just getting the records, and then such outcry from the teachers unions when they published those records, for public records...then I imagine the pushback against a news org that publishes a data dump of illegally obtained private data is going to be quite harsh. In the Panama Papers scenario, it seems that most of the records deal with private persons, many of whom aren't interesting to the public and who are too numerous for the journalists to do individual checkups on. And what they're doing is not illegal. So the ICIJ has made the right moral call, IMO, in not just throwing everything out there. [1] https://www.documentcloud.org/featured https://www.documentcloud.org/featured [2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ [3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/reuters-gutting-web-infrastructure-reuters-next-its-big-online-retooli http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html [5] http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/ http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/

swalsh 11y ago

The NYTimes was not "privileged" enough to have been a part of this new leak. To me this is them displaying their sour grapes. I also don't believe it was any accident they were not a part of the leaks. This is not the same paper that published the Watergate burglary.

throwaway2048 11y ago
considering they readily print unconfirmed government propaganda from "anonymous sources", its not surprising. Look how hard they cheer-led Iraq II and an anticipated attack on Iran.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > Look how hard they cheer-led Iraq II and an anticipated attack on Iran. For a newspaper that's otherwise pretty progressive on other societal issues, I wonder if it makes any sense for them to be pro-war and all.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    I think you're mistaking a distinct strain of upper class liberalism including a strong neoliberalism for progressivism. Plus an oft servile relationship to power.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    The US upper class tends to be liberal on social issues (e.g. gay marriage), but hawkish on foreign policy, especially as regards the middle east. Media content aligns with the political views of media owners. You can see this clearly at work now when 'progressive' US companies threaten to boycott North Carolina over a ridiculously minor issue to do with who should use what kind of toilet, but are happily trading with Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most repressive regimes. Adding 2 and 2 together gives an indication why the NYT, like most other US mainstream media, cheerled the second Iraq war.
    - greglindahl 11y ago

venomsnake 11y ago

The greatest shift is the incredibly good opsec that the organizations and journalists keep. It is a wonder.

chopin 11y ago
Against us ordinary people, yes. Against nation-state attackers I am not so sure. From which would you conclude that? I am pretty underwhelmed by the disclosures so far. Aside from Cameron nobody powerful in the western world has been hit. The majority in political power are those opposed to US or EU interest.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Just wait. They are laying the trap now.

nbevans 11y ago

It's annoying the media has not even focused on the cyberattack element in all this. The theft and circulation of private legal data.

tajen 11y ago
Protecting their source?

rorykoehler 11y ago

This will be the most underwhelming leak unless the full leak database is released. Otherwise it just stinks of a political power play. I would argue that instead of signalling a shift in mainstream journalism it signals a shift in cyber warfare tactics/strategy.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

The elephant in the room (for the past, I dunno, half century? century? something like that) is that in the 20th century the news media transitioned from being largely allied with the public at large and substantially working class folks to being entirely a part of the "establishment" and being dominated by elite, upper class perspectives. The media just does not do hard hitting investigative journalism any more, as a rule.

icebraining 11y ago
Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8... I think they are just losing the veneer.
dclowd9901 11y ago
What would you expect when the top tier newspapers only hire Ivy leaguers?
Loughla 11y ago
The easiest way to see this split, if you're ever trying to explain it to people, is to point to movie reviewers. It's the simplest version. Movie reviewers over the past few years have been off-step with major movie consumers. They've missed the mark on many movies (Deadpool and the new superman/batman movie are the most recent examples). This isn't because the reviewers' tastes are inherently better than the unwashed masses (although they would have you believe that). It's because they're elite, upper-class individuals, or at least they live that lifestyle. They're 'rich' folk who are unconnected with what John Q. Public really is into. It's a super simplification, but it's valid.
CM30 11y ago
Exhibit A, the gaming media. Note how many of the people involved are from upper class families with large trust funds and a tendency to get everything they say printed by almost anyone else in the industry. But either way, this is why the public has lost so much trust in the media. With a few exceptions here and there, they basically just serve powerful interests and try and shut down any independent attempts at social change. Part of it might be wages, average journalist wages aren't particularly high at the moment (especially not in less mainstream fields). So they tend to only be liveable for people with pre existing wealth and networks.

vnchr 11y ago

Maybe rather than a shift, it's a divergence. The Panama Papers represent classic journalistic values. It's what we want to expect: the truth uncovered. It's been a stark contrast to see news outlets blatantly ignore the Panama Papers, representing a very different set of values. Online discourse has provided a means for a growing portion of the population to see the difference and make their own choice.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
While the Panama Papers have been leaking away, the MSM have either made no mention at all of the Unaoil bribery scandal, or have pushed it far away from the front page. It's quite hard to find these stories without a direct link: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-trusted-middleman-for-oil-firm-involved-in-bribes-inquiry http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-t... http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-monaco-raid-oil-firm-unaoil-hq-corruption-investigation http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/authorities-... Maybe those classic journalistic values believe that allegations of the comprehensive corruption of the oil industry just isn't all that interesting as a story.

lunchTime42 11y ago

We allready sold out to the advertisement industry, the military sector and everyone with a double trigit bankaccount. So feed and caress us mighty invisible hand, or we shall bite you, for we know all your secrets? Journalism ala Mafia? That is the future? Can i have Wikileaks back please? I rather prefer people not in it for the gains.