Wikileaks, the world’s first stateless news organisation.
And a modern dilemma for hyper-connected media companies, so used to being on the drip feed of the establishment:
The… WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.
The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.
So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.