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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
38 November 2014
23
Lithuania
32
I
WAS at a global conference in Rio late
last year listening to Glenn Greenwald
declare journalism in a “golden age”.
Greenwald is the reporter credited with
breaking the Edward Snowden story.
He said the profession’s largest institu-
tions are experiencing tough times because
of the changing way people consume news.
This was not something to be sad about –
rather we should be happy about it.
“The media institutions are failing and
it’s a great thing to celebrate”, he said.
Journalism isn’t dying. It’s thriving and just
going to other places.”
At the same conference, the day before,
David Leigh also declared that journal-
ism was in a new “golden age”. Leigh is the
recently retired investigations editor of The
Guardian newspaper, the paper that first
carried the Snowden stories.
Leigh’s argument was this: it is a golden
age because investigative journalists are
coming together in new forms of collabo-
rations using fresh technology.
And this dynamic is producing
unprecedented levels of transparency and
impact. “We are in the age of collaboration”,
Leigh said.
The Guardian has been involved in three
of the biggest such investigative projects in
the last three years.
Leigh cited the Wikileaks collaboration
that released hundreds of thousands of
secret US diplomatic cables; the most recent
Snowden disclosures of secret data collec-
tion by the US National Security Agency; and
a story that I was involved with that broke
worldwide in April 2013 that has since
become known as Offshore Leaks.
Once upon a time in Australia a man came
along who claimed to have invented a magic
pill. You put this pill in your motor vehicle
and suddenly your fuel lasted 20 per cent
longer. What’s more, the pill managed to
eliminate all of the toxic emissions.
The Australian Trade Commission wanted
to believe so badly it had an entire section
of its website devoted to the success of this
company.
The company got nearly €300,000 in tax-
payer grants for sales that had never been
made.
It had no factories; it had no trucks – in
fact, it had no actual product for sale at all.
But it had penetrated deeply into
Australia’s elite. Many of them secretly held
shares in the company and they too thought
they were going to be rich.
So when I exposed all this as a fraud I spent
my time defending the lawsuits, attacks in
the Australian senate and I went through
the despair and doubt that all investigative
reporters are put through when powerful
people don’t want something made public.
This firm had been sending the money it
was getting from selling shares to the British
Virgin Islands and to other tax havens and
then bringing the money back to Australia,
as if it were sales of the magic pill.
As long as new investors could be found,
and the price of the shares continued to rise,
the game went on.
It continued for nearly 18 months even
after I exposed it as a fraud, until finally the
company stopped paying the lawyers who
MEDIA
Also in this section:
Pat Kenny 42
Cleraun Conference 45
Eden, not Apocalypse
The imperative for honest,
responsive, investigative,
collaborative, value-adding
gatekeeping journalism.
By Gerard Ryle
arrival; of digital age
November 2014 39
were suing me.
By then I realised that I was staring at
something much bigger – a secret universe
that allowed this kind of thing to happen.
And my pill company was only a small part
of it.
After I wrote the book about the magic
pill, a mysterious package
arrived in the mail. It was a com-
puter hard-drive – the kind you
can buy in any store. But this one
was packed with a hoard of doc-
uments – the biggest stockpile
of inside information about the
offshore tax haven system ever
obtained by a journalist.
We are talking 2.5 million
secret records.
The total size of the files, if you
were to measure it in gigabytes,
was more than 160 times larger
than the U.S. State Department
documents given to Wikileaks.
There were 120,000 clients
from all over the world, from
nearly 170 different coun-
tries. There were Americans …
Russians … Irish …
But this presented me with a
dilemma
I had spent most of my career
as an investigative reporter. We fiercely
protect our secrets, at times even from our
editors because we know that the minute
they hear what we are working on they want
it right away.
To be frank, when we find a good story
we also like to keep the glory for ourselves.
But it’s funny how life sometimes throws up
opportunities in batches.
A few months after I got the hard drive in
the mail, I got an email from my old profes-
sor at the University of Michigan,
He was on a board that ran an outfit
called the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists.
This is a non-profit organisation head-
quartered in Washington DC that oversees
some of the best investigative journalists
in the world.
It brings them together to work on cross
border projects.
He told me they were looking for some-
body new to run the network – how did I
fancy living in Washington for a few years?
And the data I had was a total mess and
extremely hard to read. It contained nearly
30 years of records taken from people who
set up offshore accounts for clients.
Going, sometimes four deep, into each of
these folders I found emails, random PDFs
with passport and home addresses, and
spreadsheets with the names of thousands
of clients.
I began doing what many other reporters
would do after me. I began looking for big
names. But the story I was looking at was
not about big names.
The real value of what I had was an unprec-
edented look into a secret
world. The same secret world
I had a glimpse of when I was
researching the magic pill.
This is a world whose very
product is secrecy. That’s what
it sells.
And this anonymity allows
some individuals and corpora-
tions to gain tax advantages not
available to average people.
It allows frauds like the
magic pill company.
It can also pit economies
and entire nations against one
another. You just have to look
at the Greek fiscal disaster,
which has been largely blamed
on offshore tax cheating. Or the
banking meltdown in Cyprus.
Both the Bernie Madoff ponzi
scheme and Enron relied on tax
havens. It’s now estimated that
half of all world trade, and one
third of all world wealth goes through tax
havens. If these people and companies are
not paying their fair share of taxes, you are
paying more.
Remember the consortium I mentioned?
Well, more than 100 of those investiga-
tive reporters went to work in more than 50
countries!
Being a non-profit, we few people at the
core of it worked on a shoestring, using
donated software and free tools like
skype.
Our early mornings would be spent talk-
ing to Europe, and our nights to Asia and
New Zealand.
But somehow, together, over a period
of about one and a half years we created
the biggest collaboration in journalism
history.
On April 4th last year, at exactly one
minute past midnight, Berlin time, we pub-
lished simultaneously with major media
partners in 35 countries.
What we did changed laws from Columbia
to Belgium and more changes are promised
right across Europe, possibly even here in
Ireland because of new initiatives being
demanded by the European Union.
Hundreds of people began receiving
‘please explain’ letters from authorities.
And we know authorities all over the world
have sought to recover tens of millions of
dollars already.
The five richest nations in Europe
got together and agreed to share tax
information.
Recently, David Cameron introduced a
new law that would make public the true
owners of British companies.
We were credited with putting tax eva-
sion on the agendas of the both the G8 and
the G20 and we have been responsible for
official inquiries in Bangladesh, India,
Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Greece, South
Korea, the Philippines.
And in October we followed it up with a
thirty-partner exposé of secret tax deals
with Luxembourg, in ‘LuxLeaks’.
But why is all this a big deal?
Well, as we heard in Rio, journalism is in
crisis. The business models that sustained
investigative reporting are broken. So you
can imagine the pressure and the ego dra-
mas that could have killed this.
The trust level had to be so high.
Any one of these journalists could have
gone with the story on their own.
But they didn’t.
The fairytale ending to this part of my talk
is this: it worked. We showed there are alter-
natives to the Wikileaks method
of just dumping raw information
on the Internet.
What we perfected along the
way was a potential new model
for journalism.
We showed how just a handful
of journalists can effect change
across the world by applying new
technology and old fashioned
shoe leather to vast amounts of
leaked information.
Together, we provided all-
important context to what had
originally been delivered to me
via the computer hard-drive.
We put the power back into
the hands of journalists – using
watchdog journalism methods
for assessing what was impor-
tant and what was not.
We also applied journalism
ethics to the release of infor-
mation and took time to dig deep – much
deeper and longer that most media allow
these days.
Instead of embracing the advances
brought by the internet, journalists like to
blame it for all our current woes.
I believe that at least some of our problems
are a lot more fundamental.
Long before the internet came along, we
had already begun to move away from what
We are in
the age of
collaboration.
The Guardian
has been
involved in
three of the
biggest such
investigative
projects in the
last three years
“
5 million secret
records, more
than 160 times
larger than the
documents
given to
Wikileaks.
There were
Americans …
Russians …
Irish …
“
40 November 2014
was actually important to the public.
News managers enjoyed such power they
figured if they simply put something on the
front page then it became news.
And if they ignored it, then it would fade
into oblivion and their original judgment
would be justified.
What we did was cut back on investigative
reporting and on hard sceptical analysis.
Instead of believing in our fundamental
value to the public by doing that work, we
actually started being fearful.
Increasingly – and unquestioningly – we
began to rely on a flow of news from govern-
ments, big business and a booming public
relations industry.
Somewhere along the way we largely
began pretending to do what we were sup-
posed to do, instead of actually doing it.
We lost our passion.
For too long now we have asked how we
can regain the ascendancy. Instead we
should be asking: what indispensable role
can our products play in the lives of the com-
munities we claim to serve?
Whatever the rights and wrongs of
Wikileaks, the media has been surprisingly
slow to wake up to the lessons it posed.
Whistleblowers once trusted newspa-
pers enough to make them their first port
of call.
But the first lesson from Wikileaks is that
that trust with the community has been bro-
ken through past condescension.
If you read the transcript of the case
against Bradley Manning you will see he
first called the Washington Post.
But he couldn’t get through to a
reporter.
Next he dialed the New York Times. His
message wasn’t returned.
He called Politico and again struck
out. Only at this point did he reach out to
Wikileaks.
The second lesson from Wikileaks – and
from Offshore Leaks and Snowden – is that
technology has freed potential sources to
collect information on a vast scale never
before thought possible.
Most media have long forgotten that good
journalism requires good information.
And some of the people best placed to pro-
vide that information are actually their own
readers or listeners.
The same technology that is destroying
our industry has the potential to remake it
– but we first have to regain our relevance
and the public’s trust.
For instance, there are barriers to
free speech we should start speaking out
about.
It is only when you work in the US that you
realise how difficult it is to practice journal-
ism under the British legal system that both
Australia and Ireland have adopted.
My former newspaper in Australia had
to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
defending my magic pill story.
The defamation laws both here and in
Australia are one of the reasons
why we have a mass media that
is largely concentrated in the
hands of the few.
It is one of the reasons why
people are reluctant to report
on obvious corruption.
You have to have deep pockets
to defend the truth.
I find it interesting that The
Guardian chose to publish the
majority of the Snowden rev-
elations through its Guardian
America subsidiary.
They were able to largely
sidestep British law and take
advantage of the same constitutional pro-
tection for freedom of speech that exists in
the US.
The biggest players in the world like the
New York Times, the Huffington Post and
The Guardian are going global.
That’s why Jeff Bezos bought the
Washington Post. That is why Pierre
Omidyar is financing Glenn Greenwald.
Newsrooms here in Ireland, too, need to
be revolutionised. They need to team up with
other media or, dare I say it, with organiza-
tions such as ICIJ.
We should embrace the concept of reverse
publishing – where we tell our communities
what we intend to publish before we pub-
lish it, in order that they can contribute and
improve the final product.
This is how we can build platforms that
would allow communities to form around
certain topics, without forgetting that the
final product will still need to arrive with
lots of surprises.
We have to free ourselves of daily dead-
lines as much as humanly possible.
That might mean less volume, but the less
will be done better.
We have to identify the issues that peo-
ple really care about. And concentrate on
those.
Every media outlet should immediately
court and seek to protect whistleblowers big
and small, because good sources are the life-
blood of agenda-setting journalism.
Every outlet should construct databases
of information that should rival national
security agencies’.
And we should apply that accumulated
knowledge in every single piece of journal-
ism that is produced.
We should ensure that a sizable number
of reporters in every newsroom be man-
aged separately but intensely away from
daily beats – employed to get stories that
nobody else has.
The approach adopted should be about
making judgements on what might be
important several days or even months in
advance.
Where all the work you present is add-
ing real value to the lives of the community
you serve or is setting an agenda for that
community.
The idea embraced by many not so long
ago that an unfiltered Internet would cre-
ate an information utopia has largely been
proved wrong.
The vastness of information is over-
whelming and, more importantly, it is hard
to know what to trust.
The public actually needs gatekeepers.
Being optimistic - in it self - will not suf-
fice. And it is clear now that cutting costs
and hoping that the hurricane will pass will
not work either.
Let us be optimistic that we are indeed
in a golden age of journalism, as suggested
in Rio, but let us agree now that journalists
hold in our hands a legacy too important to
be killed o by our own inaction. •
This is an edited version of a talk given to
the Cleraun media conference by Irish-born
Gerard Ryle, director of the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which
recently broke ‘LuxLeaks’.
collaboration: the future
MEDIA INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
The real value
of what I
had was an
unprecedented
look into a
secret world
“
