The co-founder and president of The Intercept Brasil returns to Media Party Buenos Aires seven years after presenting Vaza Jato. This time, for an edition that asks who tells the story when machines also narrate.
In 2019, Andrew Fishman arrived at Media Party with a nearly anticipatory talk title: “#VazaJato: the scoop destabilizing Brazil (leaks in the time of chats).” He came to share how The Intercept Brasil had published private conversations that exposed abuses within Operation Lava Jato.
Seven years later, the scene is different. Today, an AI agent can read thousands of messages in seconds, sort them, and write a summary. What it still cannot do is obtain them, verify their authenticity, protect whoever handed them over, and defend their publication against judges and the powerful.
From Snowden to Vaza Jato: The journalism that doesn’t fit in a summary
Fishman is an American journalist who began as a producer at National Public Radio in Washington. In 2013, he moved to Brazil and joined The Intercept, where he worked extensively with the NSA archive leaked by Edward Snowden: sensitive documents, sources at risk, and decisions about what to publish.
In 2016, he led the creation of The Intercept Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, where he served as editor-in-chief until late 2020. Since 2022, he has been its president and has guided its transition into an independent non-profit organization.
With Vaza Jato in 2019, the news outlet published messages showing improper collaboration between former judge Sergio Moro and Lava Jato prosecutors. The following year, Fishman shared the Vladimir Herzog Award with colleagues from The Intercept and Agência Pública for a series on the hidden link between that operation, the US Department of Justice, and the FBI.
The media outlet he heads continues to set the agenda. In May 2026, it revealed that Senator Flávio Bolsonaro had asked banker Daniel Vorcaro for R$ 134 million to finance a movie about his father. The revelation led to a Federal Police investigation into those payments, right in the run-up to the presidential campaign.
The pattern repeats itself: documents, sources, verification, and an editorial decision that comes with a cost. None of that appears when you ask a machine for an answer. Even so, The Intercept does not shy away from technology: in 2023, on the four-year anniversary of the series, Fishman invited readers to chat with the “Oráculo da Vaza Jato,” an AI chatbot trained on every word of the reports.
When the algorithm decides who reads you
Doing this kind of journalism comes at a price. In 2024, Intercept Brasil launched an emergency campaign signed by Fishman and Cecília Olliveira: they denounced over two dozen lawsuits and a drastic cut to their reach on social media and Google. The response was to lean on their readers, who today sustain the outlet.
It is an early version of a problem that is now escalating: if search engines and feeds already stood between a media outlet and its audience, agents add another layer that decides what is read, how it is summarized, and who gets left out.
Leaks in the time of agents
Media Party 2026 stems from a core idea: AI agents are not just another update, but a shift in who tells the story. That is why it proposes defending cognitive sovereignty: the ability to think, editorialize, and decide without delegating judgment to a machine. Fishman’s trajectory shows that sovereignty in action: that of the editor who decides what gets published, how a source is protected, and how much risk a story is worth.
For journalists, his keynote is an opportunity to hear how a high-impact investigation is sustained by an independent media outlet. For developers and entrepreneurs, it is an invitation to think about which parts of that work technology can enhance and which remain dependent on human judgment.
In 2019, Fishman spoke at Media Party about leaks in the time of chats. In 2026, the question is what a scoop means when machines also narrate.
From October 29 to 31, the stories that no agent can filter also have a place at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026. Ciudad Cultural Konex.
Register here to be part of it.
