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:
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.
They're not reporting on a shift, they're announcing a shift. Special interests, more than ever, are now going to manufacture the news and release what news they want to in order to pull the strings behind the curtains. Remember that the Panama Papers weren't journalistic in any sense. US corps make the most use of these tax haven schemes in Panama, but hardly anyone in the US was implicated; Nationalists and Putin were primarily implicated.
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.
And Ireland. And Caymans. And Switzerland (esp Zug). And quite a few others to dodge federal taxes. The Delaware and Nevada corps are to maximize local control while dodging state taxes.
Delaware provides a mostly sane legal environment for resolving disputes, I've in fact never gotten the impression that dodging state taxes is that big a motivation to register there (as opposed to another state with merely better tax rates), although I could well be wrong. And some states have taxes that are almost a duty to dodge, like Washington State's on gross revenue, even if you're not profitable, designed to capture money from big firms like Boeing in bad as well as good years.
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.
>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.
It's not about shielding the public from access to their sources. It's about shielding their sources from the public (or from any interest groups who might wish to retaliate against the sources should they be named individuals).
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.
> 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.
Doubtful. Journalists are not particularly savvy at monetizing their work beyond the normal publication channels. The only news org that I can think of that has organized anything remotely like that is ProPublica and its 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.
> 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.
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.
The collusion part worries me as well. It's not that bad in this case, because the story clearly has value. But journalists in general should avoid colluding with each other at all costs, because it just deepens the divide betwen the media and the public and opens things up to ideological hijacking of the press.
Unfortunately, we've already seen this sort of thing happening.
I think the shift is about scale. It's one thing to have a small set of documents. It's something else to have a very large set: the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of large disclosures gives another degree of legitimacy.
It also has a "dragnet" aspect to it, unlike a small targeted leak.
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.
The New York Times is quite literally not the paper that published the (main) Watergate story...Watergate came from the Washington Post. Maybe you're thinking of the Pentagon Papers?
> 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.
You know, you're right... i completely messed that up. Though I think my original intent of the post is right. It's a shame HN doesn't let me go back, and edit my post to hide my shame :D
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."
'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.'
Your link goes on to say, in a paraphrased quote corroborated by the NYT: "we approached them in the past for a similar story, and they didn't want to be involved in such a large collaborative effort, so we didn't bother this time around"
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.
I don't read it as a contrast. The ICIJ is apparently saying "we didn't gave them access, because they had no interest in cooperating with us". So NYT's statement that they didn't have access, seems accurate.
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?
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.
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.
This strikes my as a parochial viewpoint of a bunch of people riding their first-world privilege.
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.
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.
Bigger for who. That kind of story works to US's advantage in negotiations with Brazil. Especially considering leaks showing NSA spying on Petrobas with NSA proponents defending if as necessary due to their corruption.
Might also be the result of staff having a more external view of the leak and resulting stories. The Guardian might have all their resources thrown into covering the detail rather than wondering what it all might mean.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I live in Germany and operate a company without a tax advisor, and it's a massive pain but I have my reasons for doing it this way and it is indeed possible. I do both my personal and company taxes myself, and spend extremely little on it. Email me if you want to compare notes.
I'm a Finn and have literally never "done" my taxes. The government mails me a prefilled tax sheet and if it's in order and I don't want to report any extra deductions I don't have to do anything.
Very similar in NZ, except most employees don't have to do a thing, and if you do, you can do it all online using standard HTML app, no plugin.
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.
As soon as you have a mildly successful business, it makes no sense to do the taxes yourself, especially in Germany, but I guess, this is true in every country.
Well, that’s a very different case, I didn’t notice you were talking about businesses.
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.
For personal taxes, I just fill out the form. It's around a dozen pages including all the enclosures (Anlage N etc). Pretty easy, I don't know why you'd need an advisor or even a fancy software package for that. No idea about corporate taxes though.
- 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?
See, looks like you could use a Steuerberater, as well. I also initially thought "Oh, I will just indicate the income of the year", but it turns out that the Elster website showed I would get ~2500€ returned. I was expecting at least 3000€, so I didn't file that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As far as I understand it's not really an "exodus" of money. It's money that these companies have made through sales outside the US, and are not bringing in to US because it is better to keep it abroad and possibly invest there.
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.
"...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.
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).
Google doesn't need to "transfer the money" elsewhere. They conduct sales from an EU company within an EU country to another EU country.
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.
> 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 :).
> Oh, come on... you know that there are many forces working in opposite directions in the EU parliament and commission.
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.
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'.
> 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).
What moral argument can you make that money earned overseas by a multinational corporation intrinsically belongs in the U.S.? You can make that argument on the basis of nationalism—not morality.
The original post used Apple and Google as examples. I'm not aware of any scenario in which those companies move U.S. revenues offshore to shield them from taxes. If I'm not mistaken, Tim Cook is on record that Apple only shields foreign-earned income from the IRS.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.