Global collaboration is a success story for journalism, whatever its impact

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists broke its latest big story over the weekend. Bringing together more than 250 reporters from 36 countries and 59 news organizations—including the BBC, NBC News, the AP, Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung—the group has started to unveil massive problems plaguing the global medical devices industry. ICIJ and its partners flagged more than 1.7 million injuries and 83,000 deaths linked to implants such as pacemakers, breast implants, and spinal cord stimulators, which manufacturers move around the world as regulators flounder and patients and doctors are left in the dark.

The devices investigation was born out of the work of Jet Schouten, a Dutch reporter who, in 2014, asked European regulators to approve what she claimed was a vaginal mesh, but was actually the netting used to hold mandarin oranges at the grocery store. (None of the three bodies Schouten approached took serious issue with her fake product.) Late last year, based on this reporting and years of arduous follow-up work, ICIJ approved a global look at the devices industry. For the past five months, I sat inside its investigation for CJR, hanging out on conference calls, interviewing partner journalists in 11 countries, and spending time with Schouten in the Netherlands.

ICYMI: Under the skin of ICIJ’s Implant Files

The operation I observed was flush with confidence and camaraderie, and deeply impressive. That should not be surprising: ICIJ and the collaborative model it pioneered are having a moment. Two years ago, the group dropped the Panama Papers, a massive leak of offshore tax documents that exposed the accounting tricks of the rich and powerful and landed with a big global splash, implicating a succession of world leaders. The effort sparked the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister, then won a Pulitzer, then inspired a nascent Netflix movie that is set to star Meryl Streep. Last year, ICIJ followed up with the Paradise Papers, a second leaks story drawing on 13 million more offshore records.

ICIJ has been around for 21 years, during which it has worked on many different types of story. The medical devices project was nonetheless a departure from its acclaimed recent work, and thus a fresh test of its model. Could a collaboration based on painstaking (and often frustrating) shoe-leather reporting and public-records analysis work at the same grand scale as an investigation rooted in a single, centralized leak? And could a consumer affairs-facing story have the same impact as the salacious secrets of the world’s super-rich?

While every indication suggests the project navigated its technical complexities smoothly, the impact question remains open. Industry and regulators are already paying attention to ICIJ’s findings: yesterday, the US Food and Drug Administration promised to overhaul its device approval rules. Change, however, comes more easily in some countries than in others. As Lebanese journalist Alia Ibrahim told me, while many ICIJ partners were “waiting for the earthquakes that are going to happen once they publish,” in Lebanon, “I could give you 100 examples of how investigations proving corruption, proving malpractice, didn’t lead to anybody being held accountable.” And, globally speaking, ICIJ only deals with regulatory failures that are both widespread and entrenched—and, therefore, likely to be persistent.

As splashy as the Panama Papers were, efforts to overhaul global tax architecture in the time since have largely failed. ICIJ can’t force change, no matter how many journalists it might corral behind its work. But that isn’t the point of the organization. ICIJ is like any top-class individual newsroom, only much bigger. Its model empowers news organizations the world over to shine a spotlight into deep darkness, then joins those spotlights together to make a powerful single beam.

Below, more on ICIJ’s latest investigation:

• The Implant Files: You can find all ICIJ’s stories here, its overview of the global medical-devices industry here, and a full list of partners here.
• Under the skin: In my piece for CJR, I go into much more detail about how ICIJ followed through on the project, and what it means for the organization going forward.
• In the US: For the AP, Meghan Hoyer looks at problems with breast implants, and Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr lay out how spinal cord stimulators have left some patients with agonizing injuries. For NBC News, meanwhile, Andrew W. Lehren, Emily R. Siegel, and Sarah Fitzpatrick track how US-made devices export pain overseas, and, conversely, how devices withdrawn from the market overseas can remain on sale in the US.
• “All Meshed Up”: Watch Schouten and her colleagues at Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS pass off mandarin orange netting as a vaginal mesh here.

Other notable stories:

• As Dictionary.com made “misinformation” its word of the year, yesterday saw another truth-bending day in the Trump-sphere. Addressing reporters at the White House, the president said he doesn’t believe the dire conclusions of the climate change report his administration tried to bury over Thanksgiving. Then, last night, the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleged that Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort repeatedly lied to the FBI, shattering his plea deal in the process. On Twitter, Trump also mused about setting up a state-run TV network to counter CNN.
• Monday saw more nasty rhetoric around the administration’s decision, on Sunday, to pepper-spray asylum seekers, including children, at the Mexican border—on Fox & Friends, Ronald Colburn, president of the Border Patrol Foundation, said you could “put [pepper spray] on your nachos and eat it.” In a good piece for The Washington Post, Alex Horton explains why the tear gas used at the border is banned in warfare. And CJR’s Amanda Darrach interviews Kim Kyung-Hoon, the Reuters photographer whose images of a fleeing mother and two young children have been shared round the world.
• Fox Nation, 21st Century Fox’s new streaming service, launches today. Fox is targeting “superfans” by stacking the service with right-wing opinion and entertainment programming—with regular slots, for example, for pro-Trump internet personalities Tomi Lahren and Diamond & Silk. “Fox Nation may be the id of Fox News, but it is also a potentially shrewd bet for the Murdoch family, which is testing the digital waters ahead of news rivals CNN and MSNBC,” The New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum writes. “Still, every bet needs a hedge… In an effort to make sure it does not sap the ratings of the prime-time shows, Fox Nation will end its live programming around 7pm.”
• In the UK Parliament, a “grand committee” also featuring representatives from Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, France, and Latvia is grilling a Facebook executive (and an empty chair with Mark Zuckerberg’s name on it) on the spread of misinformation on the platform. The Guardian has live updates. Over the weekend, the UK lawmaker chairing the committee dispatched the Serjeant-at-Arms to escort a US software executive to Parliament, where he was made to hand over internal Facebook documents in his possession. CJR’s Mathew Ingram has a recap.
• NPR’s Tom Goldman tracks the turnaround of the Malheur Enterprise, a small paper in rural Oregon whose revenue has more than tripled in the three years since Les Zaitz, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with The Oregonian, took charge. In April, CJR’s Alexandria Neason interviewed Zaitz about his reporting, in the 1980s, on Oregon’s Rajneeshee cult—the basis for the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.
• The Newseum in Washington, DC, is opening a new exhibit on the shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper group in Annapolis, Maryland, where a gunman killed five staffers in June. The exhibit will focus on the threats journalists face, and how the Gazette got a paper out in the wake of tragedy.
• And for CJR, Lyndsey Gilpin reflects on two years in charge of Southerly, an online publication she started in late 2016 to bust lazy stereotypes about the American South. “Seen from afar through the national media’s lens, the place I love seemed sorely misunderstood and misrepresented,” Gilpin writes. “Reporters set dispatches in strip clubs and diners while making a mockery of people’s frustrations and concerns. In many stories, glaring problems—systemic discrimination, pollution, and exploitative industries—were largely invisible.”

ICYMI: Facebook and The Innovator’s Dilemma