The ICIJ and ProPublica consistently put out the highest quality investigative journalism, exposing injustices committed by some of the biggest institutions in the world. Blows mainstream media out the water.
I strongly recommend users here to donate to both, and even to cancel subscriptions to major media institutions, who have opted to dropped investigative journalism for sensationalism.
Because its reporters are from the "mainstream media." Often reporters who could not get any further in their old companies, or who were cut from their organizations due to budget cuts.
cancel subscriptions to major media institutions
...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether.
My local paper is bad. But I subscribe, and reading it (actually reading, not looking at a web site) have learned that there are good people there trying to do good work. Between the lines you can see that they are underfunded, and do a lot with very little.
I also subscribe to large, award-winning important journalistic endeavors. "Real news," as it were. But I also know that award-winning journalism doesn't magically appear out of thin air, or straight from journalism schools. Those reporters have to learn their trade at small newspapers, television stations, and radio outlets to work their way up to the big leagues. If we don't support local reporters, there won't be any smart journalists in the future.
"News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether."
No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content, you are voting with your wallet. Everyone should do that. Definitely dont stay with sucky provider but give the same money (or more) to someone better, that helps things to develop.
That works for cans of soup, it doesn't work for journalism. This isn't a fight between companies. It's about preserving democracy.
You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections. That simply won't happen.
That's why we need local media. Those local, low-level politicians have to be held accountable, or they end up becoming congressmen and senators, and other high-level officials.
> You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections.
Not implausible; enough US attention drawn to a particular British publication got GuardianUS to happen; why wouldn't enough paying attention to a national publication and the stories it already has about a particular locality from local residents be a signal that would lead that publication to opening up a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?
Actually, the 20 years I spent in journalism tells me it is completely implausible.
a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?
Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.
The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.
And even if it did, people would demonize it because it was centralized, or at one time published an article they didn't agree with, the way they do with the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.
I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public. That was when television journalism started dying.
> Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.
> The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.
So, what? It wouldn't happen all at once or with just one organization, anyway. Maybe the Guardian sees demand from it's subscriber base for an additional product with local coverage in a couple of places, initially, and expands imto that. Maybe someone else does it in other localities.
Now, personally, I don't think there is an adequate market for profitable paid non-ad-supported local news of the type that we are used to thinking of as general need coverage because the people willing to pay are a narrower group with deeper and more focussed needs, but nonprofit quasi-patronage model like the Guardian and some others could work.
> Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.
No, what destroyed the traditional news media is not understanding the value proposition and drastically cutting newsrooms in shortsighted consolidation, a mistake which it hadn't recovered from and was maybe just starting to recognize when new media came along and made it impossible to recover other than by largely becoming the new competition.
What killed journalism is...nothing. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about the more opaque bias of the time when the media, top-to-bottom was far more uniform in it's bias than it is today, and when the major media were even narrower in their ownership, because people mistook (and mistake Even more in retrospect than contemporary audiences did) the uniformity of vías for neutrality and objectivity, but journalism is no less alive today than at any time in the past. Probably far more.
>I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public.
Dang. You old. It's like a different world now, that there's no news you can rely on. Oh they'll scream and cry and say "but they don't exert editorial control . . ." (but they fucking do).
No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content [...]
But that manifestly doesn't happen. Nobody wants to pay 20 different local bloggers to cover 20 different local issues, large firms asset strip or crowd out small firms, and if all else fails the truth is denounced as 'fake news'. The market is not a meritocracy.
I find this way too charitable to mainstream media organizations, but I don’t have the right understanding to make an argument against.
My impression is that there’s too much news produced. Journalism makes people feel more depressed, and editorial sections are of the most read and most filled with junk parts of publications. Facebook and Google are complicit in generation of division and fake news, but news media has been complicit toward that end my entire life. Most mainstream publications seem to push a particularly narrow neoliberal mindset and little else.
Local news has been filled with poison and junk since at least the mid 90s from my recall.
This is very hard to find these days, but if you can, try to subscribe to a local newspaper that is not owned by a hedge fund. A friend is a reporter at a smallish hedge fund-run local newspaper in Northern California and has many horrible stories about the slashing of resources and dilution of quality all in the name of maximizing gains for some faraway owners since the hedge fund took over about a decade ago. [1]
Also, try finding an alt-weekly if your city is lucky enough to still have one. [2]
> ...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
Newspapers had chosen to became online ad-ridden tracker infested (5MB script for 5kB of article) junk quite a while before the entire publishing industry was even willing to admit that, maybe, people didn't like paper as much any more.
Sure there may be some quality journalists funded by this.
But even for the "quality" outlets, you can see that, in quantity the ad money drives clickbait trash articles (pretending to make money for the "quality" articles, but this ultimately has to end up just making money to make more clickbait trash).
News websites are in fact the only mainstream websites I visit, where I feel I need my adblocker to "protect" me, instead of just blocking annoyances. Mainly because it's just so much script compared to content.
I canceled my subscription to my local newspaper because of the number of advertisements and trackers on every page. I would happily pay for a subscription. I expect it to cost more than an option supported by advertising. But they do not want to sell me such an option. The newspapers had decades to figure this out. Serve readers/subscribers or serve advertisers.
Whitney Webb is doing pretty well on her lonesome. So the excuse for establishment press to hide establishment crimes is because we don’t pay for subscriptions.
In case of this specific item, you may want to see if Google still digs up the story of how the chancellor of exchequer flew to DC to stop DoJ. Very interesting story. (And why are the shady banking outfits in the islands of “the Crown”?)
”The involvement of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority in the US government's investigations and enforcement actions relating to HSBC, a British-domiciled institution, appears to have hampered the US government's investigations and influenced Department of Justice's decision not to prosecute HSBC".
That’s from a congressional report. Please pay NYTimes so they will look into this :(
This is a depressing misunderstanding of how this kind of journalism works, particularly in the case of the ICIJ. It is mainstream journalists doing the work -- journalists who, in today's media economy, and with the increased complexity of data-led investigations, can't afford to do the work in isolation.
Each organisation brings different skills, not to mention legal budgets. David Leigh, one of the most highly-regarded British investigative journalists, puts it best when he says there's a big difference between knowing about a scandal and knowing you can publish a story about it.
I've worked with the ICIJ in the past, and even my tiny tiny contribution (a small part of the Paradise Papers work) was exhausting. Please, a little more respect for the mainstream journalists who do this work day in, day out.
This is a very poor example then, it’s a mish-mash of accusations that misrepresents the obligations of banks and ignores the rights of account holders.
Just filing a SAR doesn’t obligate a bank to freeze the funds, that’s a job for regulators. Taking your funds away just because of wrong headed suspicions should be illegal, but happens regularly and this “article” excoriates bank’s first not doing it more often.
Agree. Quoting "documents identify more than $2 trillion in transactions between 1999 and 2017 that were flagged by financial institutions’ internal compliance officers as possible money laundering or other criminal activity — including $514 billion at JPMorgan and $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank." Banks told regulators. They didn't do anything and the article doesn't ask why
Not sure I agree. It's an extremely effective peice of reporting that shows not only that AML enforcement, as it exists today, is fundamentally broken and easily subverted but also gives a good overview of the perverse incentives, banking and political, that cause it (and the scale of the task needed to fix it).
Nothing in the article suggests "taking people's funds away". The main focus is how meaningless and small the incentives are for major banks to "do the right thing" and the horrendous effects them turning a blind eye has on countries and their populations.
I'm sure the big banks (i.e. those with a global footprint and offering U.S. correspondent accounts - essentially the primary enablers for global laundering) would behave very differently if they faced the real prospect of being whacked with a large regulatory stick (e.g. being cut from USD payment/clearing networks or fines of 5% of global revenue and personal criminal records for the worst offenders within their ranks).
The problem is it's not only Russian kingpins and corrupt Ukranian politicians who need their money laundering. An awful lot of financial corruption also exists/originates within the West. Overhauling and fixing a system that aids and abets all these powerful entities is not easy.
Banks are constantly being whacked with sticks, but that will never prevent a tiny percentage of millions of bank employees from accepting bribes to subvert their banks controls.
This price is entirely one sided and ignorant of the damage those regulations inflict on honest bank customers. The hundreds of thousands who’ve had accounts closed, or funds seized, without explanation or recourse.
When professional journalists write a one sided advocacy piece ignorant of the damage the course they advocates causes, they are also advocating more aggressive account seizure and system lockout for innocent customers, whether they realize it or not.
A single-branch local bank could legitimately know their customers on a personal basis and their dealings. Joe-bob comes in with $12k in cash? But we already knew through social circles he just sold his truck, so that's not really suspicious. The guy who has never interacted with anyone outside the county and is suddenly requesting wire transfers to Outer Slobavia? Likely money mule.
I doubt that HSBC can maintain that level of awareness, so we build clunky rules to simulate it.
Agreed, the video and on surface reading is very much not what compliance/regulation enforcement action that banks really do.
And then it's the hot potato, what is trust in a banking system if your money doesn't show up? What about holding the funds itself, creates a liability problem for the bank?
I also am surprised this was written by "Buzzfeed news" too.
--
I haven't dug into it fully, but, surface wise, it's truly a misrepresentation of the financial system, SWIFT, FEDWIRE and remittances.
> The ICIJ and ProPublica consistently put out the highest quality investigative journalism, exposing injustices committed by some of the biggest institutions in the world. Blows mainstream media out the water.
ICIJ is the mainstream of mainstream. It's as mainstream and establishment as you can get. Also propublica is mainstream as well and created by bankers ( ironic huh ). So much of mainstream media was actually started by bankers.
If they do quality journalism then so be it, but they are mainstream/state enterprises. Not independent ones.
Just to be clear. The ICIJ is not a state enterprise. In fairness you said mainstream/state but mainstream is a meaningless term in my experience. It is what it is. Their about page gives more details.
Because its reporters are from the "mainstream media." Often reporters who could not get any further in their old companies, or who were cut from their organizations due to budget cuts.
cancel subscriptions to major media institutions
...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether.
My local paper is bad. But I subscribe, and reading it (actually reading, not looking at a web site) have learned that there are good people there trying to do good work. Between the lines you can see that they are underfunded, and do a lot with very little.
I also subscribe to large, award-winning important journalistic endeavors. "Real news," as it were. But I also know that award-winning journalism doesn't magically appear out of thin air, or straight from journalism schools. Those reporters have to learn their trade at small newspapers, television stations, and radio outlets to work their way up to the big leagues. If we don't support local reporters, there won't be any smart journalists in the future.