The Panama Papers and the Monster Stories of the Future
The movie “Spotlight,” which for many journalists provided a jolt of pure gratification, follows the canonical story line for news-biz triumphs. A determined team at a major-league newspaper, led by a brave and supportive editor, is permitted to spend months relentlessly chasing down a major story. Sources help, of course, but they need to be persuaded and verified, and there is much more to the work than simply receiving material. Finally, after many setbacks that would have daunted ordinary mortals, the team fits all the pieces together. The presses roll. Justice is done. Nobody but a big news organization could have accomplished this.
A lifetime ago, the Watergate and Pentagon Papers stories, at least as told by journalists, went this way, and more recently the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden stories, if you squinted, could look as if they did, too. There were renowned, heroic papers involved—the Guardian, the Times, the Washington Post—and their involvement seemed to be essential to the large effects of the revelations. What’s unusual about the monster story of the moment, the Panama Papers, at least in the United States, is that it lacks one lead actor, which usually has been an organization from the top rank of the journalism establishment. The coördinator of the coverage is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nineteen-year-old subsidiary of a nonprofit news organization in Washington called the Center for Public Integrity. The I.C.I.J. has only eleven full-time employees. The heart of their work, in this and other cases, was not “doing the story” by themselves but organizing an international network that took on the project, with all the parties agreeing to abide by a single deadline and to share credit. There were a hundred and seven media partners, some large (the BBC), some tiny (Inkyfada, in Tunisia). The Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the big American broadcast networks are notably absent from the list.
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If Buzenberg is right, then the Panama Papers is the latest important piece of evidence in support of the notion that, in every realm, the way work gets done is shifting from big institutions to loose networks. It may be, though, that the I.C.I.J. model is merely a phase in a progression toward an even more radically distributed way of breaking monster stories, one that would not involve journalists at all. Mark Felt, the F.B.I. official who was Watergate’s Deep Throat, merely gave cryptic spoken clues to Bob Woodward—he absolutely depended on journalism to get the story out. Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, had the ability to photocopy his material but not to publish it, so he needed journalism, too. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden could (and in Assange’s case, did) self-publish their purloined data troves electronically. They decided to seek partners in the mainstream media in order to get more attention, and to take advantage of American legal protections that made it difficult for the government to prevent publication.
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