Integrity Score 2097
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How Facebook is messing with public opinion, sharpening political divides and even igniting violence, all for sake of eyeballs, is now part of established facts. The US Senate and the British parliament are discussing the matter, even as more dirt on the Big Tech giant’s principle of putting profits over people keeps coming out in installments. This is a story broken not by an investigative journalist, but by an employee who chose to go public with internal documents. Though Frances Haugen initially channeled the stuff through a newspaper, now she is sharing it with more outlets.
The whistleblower first shared some of her material with the Wall Street Journal, since the newspaper had already been writing much about what was wrong with Facebook. But soon she started distributing her material to more outlets (18 now): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/business/media/facebook-leak-frances-haugen.html
The campaign has been orchestrated by a PR firm whose head once served as an aide to President Barack Obama: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/facebook-leak-consortium/2021/10/25/8125341e-3593-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html
Time was when intrepid reporters went undercover, cultivated deep sources and came away with a document or two. After Julian Assange, Edward Snowden et al, investigative journalism these days seem outsourced. Non-journalists, motivated by public good, are using their positions to leak sensitive internal material.
This is often called ‘revelatory journalism’ and has been in practice for quite some time. But it used to be a one-to-one dealing. The new-age ‘change-makers’ like Haugen are deploying new tactics for the maximum impact by selecting a variety of outlets. Journalists are reduced to a passive role of analyzing documents, doing fact-checks and running the story.
There are whole organizations, not part of traditional news media, which are doing all the dirty work and serving the whole ready package to carefully hand-picked news organizations.
The Pegasus spyware scandal earlier this year, quite a major scoop, was the handiwork of the human rights group Amnesty International and Paris-based non-profit Forbidden Stories: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/07/18/takeaways-nso-pegasus-project/
The environmental lobby group Greenpeace too has a wing that does ‘investigative journalism’, Unearthed. In the run-up to the COP26 climate meet, it leaked documents to BBC and The Guardian revealing the fossil fuel and meat producing countries lobbying against climate action: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/10/21/leaked-climate-lobbying-ipcc-glasgow/