Did you have this same position with the Snowden leaks? Dump it on the web and it lacks credibility. Filter it through journalists who can use their resellers to make sense of it and the public gets to hear the important repercussions of the leak instead of having to try and figure it all out themselves.
At least they were transparent to exactly why the information was filtered. Credibility is certainly a good point but 100 people are going to have issue with sifting through terabytes of data.
In the case it's a leak which is being funnelled by the reporters.
Maybe this is because of legal reasons, I have no idea, but would it not be better they just dumped the whole data set onto the web?