Isn’t the raw data just a list of phone numbers? What would you do with that without further compromising the privacy of the people behind them?

There are security and privacy reasons not to publicly dump leaks like this, and the distrust of the media should be somewhat offset by multiple outlets analyzing the data separately.

That said, I'm unsure how the media could twist "x country spied on y individual." Knowing the types of people being spied on, it should be assumed most people of similar importance are being spied on by someone.

I take your point, but what echoes in my mind is when the Hillary emails were leaked, and people like van Jones were saying no you’re not allowed to look at that, but we the media, we are allowed to look at that. They could redact information, but I lament that my trust in the media is so low that I cannot fully trust it without seeing the raw data myself. Even having that raw data available would give me more confidence in the reporting.

If you had access to the data, how would you verify that Durov's number was listed? Then what confidence would that give you? Trusting an anonymous leak more than the media who vetted the data seems misguided.

What are you going to do with the phone numbers of 50,000 important individuals?

What sort of cost-benefit analysis are you doing that makes you think your right to see other people's PII trumps their privacy?

The indications are on github if you want to check your phone.