Talking crap — a beginner’s guide

No, daughter of the prime minister and in the eyes of some the heir apparent — the Panama Papers are not crap. And who are you, a person who as far as is known with little journalistic experience, to challenge the authenticity both of the Panama Papers and the journalists that exposed them in the first place? And no, the Panama Papers have not been ‘trashed’ in other parts of the world as has been tweeted so emphatically, and if the tweeter had bothered to read any of the innumerable background papers on the matter they would have found that there are over 150 investigations and audits ongoing in 80 countries. And yes, it was about corruption. And no, it was not some grand conspiracy to bring down the government of Pakistan and anybody that thinks otherwise is considerably deluded far beyond the merely misinformed if they believe otherwise. The tweeter is talking crap, but perhaps unwisely doing so very publicly and thus exposing themselves to the gaze of others whose crap-detectors are considerably more operant than theirs are.

The journalists that broke the story in the first place had done their job diligently. They found ‘an astonishing number’ of cases of corruption within the Panama Papers as subsequent legal actions globally testify to. Pakistan and its own offshore activity was but a very small part of the overall picture and it was never the focus of the investigation by itself. As has been pointed out by some of the respondents to the ill-considered and poorly informed tweets journalism is about telling truths, sometimes telling truths to power and power rarely likes what it hears. The founders of the source of the Panama Papers, the firm of Mossack Fonseca, are in custody and most of its employees have been sacked, and it is being investigated itself beyond whatever some of those who employed its services are being investigated for. We are grateful for the meticulously crafted object lesson in how to talk crap, and we are better informed for this interestingly received intervention.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2017.

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