Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
This isn't about democratization of data and journalism, and it's not about "everyone has a press"
It's about large monied institutions using strong news brands to provide news not for enlightening people, but for their consumption so that they can continue feeding narratives that people already believe. It's not news, it's programming.
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2016/04/09/pa...
In general, providing sane corporate governance is Deleware's unique selling proposition, and it's a big business for a very small state. I once worked for a company that in the early '90s sold that part of its government a monster Kodak ImageLink scanner (600 lb, peak scanning rate 18 inches per second at 200dpi, realistic rate 3,000 pages per hour), and the people involved in that sale said they really needed it.
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.
Traditionally speaking, confidential sources were most often people, and not always documents. Or they were people passing along documents. These people needed protection from those whose interests their leaks would disrupt. And thus, a strict code of confidentiality is often considered to be part of traditional journalistic ethics.
I'm not saying this is always upheld, everywhere. I'm not saying certain unscrupulous publishers won't hide behind or twist this code to their personal benefit. But the code exists, at least ostensibly, for a good reason.
Recklessly releasing data (according the mainstream media) could put (very important) people at risk...
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
[2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/
[3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html
https://projects.propublica.org/data-store/
It publishes for free the public data that it has collated. For datasets in which they've put significant amount of work wrangling and vetting it, they charge fees. I don't know how much money they've recouped from that but them being a non-profit, if it were enough to change the game, we'd probably hear about it at some point.
I find it horrifying that all major journalistic outlets are colluding about what they will and won't report, and when. It shouldn't even be possible that they're all that chummy and editorially identical. Realistically, they're all just small parts of the same hedge funds, but it still bothers me.
Unfortunately, we've already seen this sort of thing happening.
It also has a "dragnet" aspect to it, unlike a small targeted leak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
The NYT's public editor looked into the matter here:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/why-no-big-...
> I talked Tuesday afternoon with Marina Walker, the deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who told me that her organization’s model – which she calls “radical sharing” – has not proved a good fit for every news organization. In previous projects, she said, ICIJ worked with, or tried to work with, other news organizations, including The Times, and “it wasn’t always a good fit.”
> Part of that, she said, is the idea of sharing all material, not keeping anything exclusive. Another part is agreeing to observe embargoes for when material would be published.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2016/04/05/panama-papers-global-corr...
The part I have transcribed below starts at 23:29.
Tom Ashbrook (NPR host): "Gerard, why weren't there more american papers, more american news organizations involved in this investigation - New York Times not part, Washington Post ... not part of it - why not, Gerard?"
Gerard Ryle (Director of the ICIJ): "We found it very difficult to get major US newspapers or organizations to collaborate. I guess they feel that they are big enough on their own, they don't need to do this, whereas we found it much easier outside the US to get people to listen to this new way of working. And that's really,... it's been driven by necessity."
Tom Ashbrook: "Was it because you weren't prepared to share all the data with these papers?"
Gerard Ryle: "No, that's not the issue at all. We were absolutely prepared to share everything from day one. What we want them to do though is join the investigation with us and with our colleagues around the world and go on a journey together. So it's not like go at the very end and give them a fully made story - we make the stories together as we go along."
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/why-no-big-...
'Because The Times was not a part of the global consortium and was not aware that the story was coming, it needed some time to get its own story going. “We didn’t know these documents were out there and being worked on,” he said.
“We didn’t have access to the documents, and that is a very big issue,” he said. But Mr. Purdy said he hoped, and had good reason to believe, that that would change soon.'
The NYT can't turn up their noses when they were invited to my birthday party last year, then complain when they don't get invited to my much cooler party this year.
As for "we didn't know": it's unclear on which level the ICIJ communicates with newspapers, but it makes sense that happens on a managerial level, not editorial. So it's not that surprising to me that a NYT editor would be unaware of the documents.
The more interesting part to me, is why the editor expects the situation to "change soon". Has management reversed course now that they see how big the story is getting, or are the reporters/editors up in arms because they were blindsided by management?
> Intriguing about this leak/others: the NYT's decision to suppress their NSA story in 2005 directly robbed them of influence in this decade.
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.
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.
I suggest that you, your co-workers, hacker colleagues, and friends who are transgender spend some time in Saudi-Arabia or on ISIS-controlled territory to get a perspective on what really matters.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/world/americas/insiders...
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.
* http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4150900/intuit-lobbies-aga...
* http://theweek.com/articles/466220/why-turbotax-tried-make-t...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
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.
I had do a return once in 12 years - I had earned contract income over and above regular salary and share sale capital gains in the same year. That's it.
There, indeed, Steuerberater are very common. But yeah, that’s probably the case in most countries, as companies are a lot more complex – just the whole case with funneling your money through, say, the UK and the Netherlands to reduce taxes.
Two cases that come directly to mind:
- Moved to Germany in 2013, worked only 2 months in the end of the year. Tax was collected directly from my employer. Brutto salary in the year was obviously less than the minimum. So I imagined I could get a full refund. Talked with some of my colleagues, none of them would give me any other advice except "You need to get a Steuerberater". Talked with closer friends, and even the German ones had difficulty to figure out what to fill in order to get all of the taxes paid.
- 2015 I started working as a consultant. That's when I finally went to a Steuerberater, and to my surprise, the Finanzamt never got my Steuernummer. So how is a foreigner supposed to even know how to fix that?
About your first point, I'd have assumed that putting the total amount you earned that year in the income box on Anlage N would suffice?
When you start freelancing as a consultant then it's probably a good idea to consult a Steuerberater, yeah.
When I went to the Steuerberaterin, I managed to get almost 4500€ back.
Was it good to have the help from her? Sure. But that cost me about 200€, plenty of time and also me having to get involved a lot in the process of solving the simple issue of "I need to be an expert in the tax code just to get my money back from the Government".
If my only choices are between Germany's "complicated in order to keep humans involved and costly" vs the American "complicated to keep tax software companies around, but not so costly", I'd actually take the American model.
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.
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.
That is precisely the point of EU. I am therefore astonished that it mostly seems to be the same persons and political parties that both
a) want Britain to stay in EU
b) castigate Google for acting precisely in the way the EU legislation has been intended to work.
Personally, I engage in tax avoidance schemes e.g. by purchasing wine and spirits and even using restaurant services in a lower-tax regime, which is across a patch of sea two hours away (within EU). I have also avoided taxes by ceasing to use haircut/barber services in my country where there's VAT and service prices generally are very high.
Right: http://uk.businessinsider.com/r-google-accounts-show-11-bill...
> That is precisely the point of EU. I am therefore astonished that it mostly seems to be the same persons and political parties that both
> a) want Britain to stay in EU
> b) castigate Google for acting precisely in the way the EU legislation has been intended to work.
Oh, come on... you know that there are many forces working in opposite directions in the EU parliament and commission. Lobbies are pushing for legislation that are directly against the EU's interest. That and the whole political facade and short term benefits.
> Personally, I engage in tax avoidance schemes e.g. by purchasing wine and spirits and even using restaurant services in a lower-tax regime, which is across a patch of sea two hours away (within EU). I have also avoided taxes by ceasing to use haircut/barber services in my country where there's VAT and service prices generally are very high.
I'd rather my country's fiscal brigade or whatever goes after bigger fishes than you :).
Tax avoidance != tax fraud (or fiscal fraud)
Of course there are. What I'm saying is that it particularly seems to be parties of the political left, for instance Labour in the UK, who are both pro-EU and against the very essence of EU with their nationalist and protectionist economic rhetoric. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are more skeptical of EU in general but more for free trade.
It's similar in other countries.
> Tax avoidance != tax fraud (or fiscal fraud)
Quite. I don't think anyone has caught Google or other big companies of large-scale tax fraud. There are of course always some small differences of opinion on how some status should be interpreted, but by and large the way the corporations work has been found to be in compliance with law. Large figures of "tax gap" are published but based on fantasy.
"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/
In the EU, merely trying not to buy goods subject to VAT is a tax avoidance measure!
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).
they have a duty to their shareholders to minimize
their exposure to taxes in general
[1] http://www.alternet.org/hillary-clintons-plush-life-corporat...
It's quite hard to find these stories without a direct link:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/09/tory-donor-was-t...
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.
I think they are just losing the veneer.
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.
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.
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.