David Pegg, The Guardian: the Panama Papers and the impact of the Internet on Journalism

 etichetat jurnalism

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The objective of the conference about journalism and corruption on July 14 was to present the European Corruption Observatory, but I also had the privilege to hear one of the brilliant young European journalists who worked on the Panama Papers and to write down some of his ideas.

David Pegg - The GuardianDavid Pegg has been working for The Guardian for only 5 years, but he was lucky to be assigned two of the most important subjects in the financial world: the Swiss Leaks and the Panama Papers. He started by thanking the organisers for taking him out of the UK for a day or two, as he said „it’s very boring these days in that country”.

During the panel about investigative journalism media freedom in fighting corruption, Pegg pointed out some ways in which the new technologies in general and the Internet in particular affected the work of investigative journalists.

  • The Internet made possible the Panama Papers, gathering around 400 journalists from 100 media outlets in 80 countries. Who could imagine that two decades ago, in the era of telephones and mail?
  • The global synchronisation between the media organisations created a massive impact all over the world, no matter the political regime or the level of wealth.
  • The speed was amazing, nobody had time to react or to prevent the spread.

David Pegg identified three challenges that the Internet brought to journalism practitioners:

  1. Data protection. Journalists have to be careful what type of data they are handling or passing along.
  2. Hiding traces. Everything that journalists do online can be traced, tracked and used for prosecution. Moreover, national and international intelligence agencies are interested in journalists’ actions and they are not afraid to log their movements and actions. IP spoofing, data encryption and such are now some of the required skills for experimented journalists.
  3. Risk of prosecution. Related to the two above, there is always a risk of taking journalists to court, in order to prevent publishing the results of their investigations.

During the discussion in the panel, Pegg expressed his hope that journalism would still be a sustainable endeavour, but warned media outlets to be careful about private funding.

„Don’t rely on the money of rich people, because some of them might have Swiss bank accounts”, he added.

Here are some tweets from the event:

On a side note, please check the European Corruption Observatory’s website, an initiative of Transparency International. It’s a treasure chest of corruption cases from all over our continent and it’s a very reliable source to identify trends and to observe the big picture in this field.

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