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In a job interview with a due diligence firm some years ago, one of its vice presidents told me she had investigated the owner of a firm in New York who her client suspected of having mafia ties.
A former journalist, she conned a meeting with the businessman by pretending to be working on a book about small companies like his. Just as she sat down, he was called away to take care of something. Alone in his office for five minutes, she took the opportunity to rummage through his desk.
"Could you do that?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "I could pretend to be writing a book if I half-believed it. Like, if I could convince myself there was a book there that I might or might not end up doing. But I couldn't lie outright and certainly couldn't lift stuff from his desk. My whole journalism training is against that. It's unethical." (Also, although I didn't say it, it struck me as unwise to risk getting caught by the mafia).
I've been reminded of this old story ― I didn't get the job, by the way ― with all this news about the Panama Papers. As you know, these are the leaked documents that show how the rich and powerful hide their money in offshore tax havens.
The largest such data leak in history, several hundred journalists have been combing through the millions of files. As a result, global media has been full of front page revelations. The prime minister of Iceland has resigned, the prime minister of Britain is embarrassed, Putin has called it a plot, and there's more to come.
What amazes me, though, is the absence of a debate over journalistic ethics.
Society can accept that while it might not be legal, it is ethically acceptable for media to receive stolen material and base newspaper stories on its contents provided that the public interest is being served.
And in this case the public interest would appear to be the exposure of the bad things that some bad people, or people in positions of public trust, are doing with their wealth. To be clear, the public interest is served if illegality is exposed.
This picture, however, is complicated by two things. One is that tax havens are quite legal. The Panama Papers are not the private documents of a ruthless dictator or a drug cartel. We may assume the vast majority of contracts and emails which have been stolen are both legal and legitimately private. Their exposure, therefore, is legally and morally questionable. It certainly does not serve the public interest.
This leads to the second complication, which is that the people charged with assessing criminality are not qualified to do so.
Most journalists are clueless about money. There's a good explanation for this. They don't have much of it. Few have ever even established a company and paid corporate tax. If they were well paid, they would know from experience that avoiding unnecessary tax, as all businesses do, is a moral and fiduciary good, and they would naturally know how offshore tax havens function in the international business world.
They would also appreciate that, until the world falls under a global tax regime, which will probably happen one day, countries are entirely within their rights to set their tax levels as high or low as they see fit.
But the interviews with Panama Papers journalists I have read or heard on the radio give me the impression that this is a minor detail.
The other problem with journalists is that while the idea of public interest serves as a broad justification, it is not the yardstick by which they really assess their work. In journalism, the professional measure is newsworthiness. Media are profit-driven enterprises which require their employees to produce newsworthy stories.
This means that the factor determining which Panama documents get exposed is not justice but whether they make for a good story. If, for example, the documents include information about a company owned by a celebrity with large breasts, we will soon be seeing it, along with photos of her on a beach somewhere. Then there will be follow-up stories of her denials, along with more bikini pictures. And so on, until newsworthiness is served.
Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of investigative journalism and in transparency. But I am also sensitive to power abuse and authoritarian attitudes to justice.
Given this, if I had been approached by the Panama Papers whistleblower, I would have hesitated.
My inclination would have been to pass them on, either to the appropriate authorities or to the appropriate NGO, with a promise from them to leak me the first good story.
I like to think this would have been the more ethical course of action, but it might just explain why I would not make a very good journalist.
Michael Breen is the CEO of Insight Communications Consultants, a public relations company, and author of "The Koreans and Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader.'' Contact him at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.
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