Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

one of the args against wikileaks is kind of persuasive, and that is that their M.O. is doing these giant, undirected data dumps rather than doing, say, reporting around a particular issue in the data - an injustice of some kind - and then releasing that, along with the pertinent data. but they don't do that. so individual issues of injustice or what have you just get swallowed in the mountains of other stuff and none of it gets any traction. i can sympathize with trad news orgs who are like "dude, you're doing it wrong"

in that case said organizations should consider doing the reporting themselves

Well the Wiki part of it is that they're expecting/hoping people will sort through it all and find the good stuff. That's how the whole site's set up, so you can tag and share significant things.

TH---you're right about wikileaks "doing it wrong," maybe, but i don't get what you mean by "arguments against." against....what? their continued existence? their legal status as "journalists"? just because wikileaks did it wrong doesn't mean that they should be singled out for special treatment in the legal sphere.

trad news orgs are also "doing it wrong" so

one of the args against wikileaks is kind of persuasive, and that is that their M.O. is doing these giant, undirected data dumps rather than doing, say, reporting around a particular issue in the data - an injustice of some kind - and then releasing that, along with the pertinent data. but they don't do that. so individual issues of injustice or what have you just get swallowed in the mountains of other stuff and none of it gets any traction. i can sympathize with trad news orgs who are like "dude, you're doing it wrong"

this IS what he's doing, but that doesn't mean it isn't journalism. It's just really shitty journalism. Internet takes once august profession and makes it shitty SHOCKAH

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less.

gbx i mean as an argument against the effectiveness of their methods, not whether what they're doing is legal (which it is, i'm pretty sure)

timing and context is a huge part of getting a story to "stick" and the only context for such reporting at this stage is "this was part of the wikileaks document dump". many trad news orgs ARE building up entire issue pieces based on these cables but not only are individual revelations buried in the mass of themselves, the assange drama overshadows them as well.

i think this was once referred to in the old, decrepit, discredited world of newsgathering as "don't become the story"

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less

i mean, that's fine and i get that, but it's fair game to wonder whether this is an effective model for actually getting crucial information to the public

it's journalism in the legal sense, it's protected by the law

which should be pretty self-evident to any American lawyer, but unsurprisingly that's too much to expect of our elected officials

I wonder how many encrypted secret "whatever you do, don't let him go" wires were sent this morning.

what's interesting, too, is how the sheer magnitude of what wikileaks is capable of, in the technical sense, is what breaks pundits/politicians ability to see it as journalism. i've just suffered through some CNN videos and op-eds and you have ppl that would say "yes well of course journalists should do their job and be a check on gov't and expose corruption woodward/bernstein ya ya ya but c'mon the guy released two hundred fifty thousand cables!! and they're hosted on servers all over the world, where anybody can just read them!"

its almost as if our old protections were granted grudgingly because the authorities (whoever) knew that the spread of information operated at a very human rate, and that stray copies of documents typically numbered in the dozens. but ffs if tens of thousands of ppl are sitting on insurance.aes256 its a bit of a game changer.

79 according to wikileaks
xp

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less

there's already a place for that:

http://cryptome.org

tracer, tipsy makes an excellent point:

Well the Wiki part of it is that they're expecting/hoping people will sort through it all and find the good stuff. That's how the whole site's set up, so you can tag and share significant things.

― a tenth level which features a single castle (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 10:23 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

ideally, WL would function as a resource FOR journalists/interested members of the public.

i mean, i still have never even looked around the site! all the stuff from the cables that i've heard has been from traditional news sources cuz, you know, i don't want to go sifting through it all.

there's already a place for that:

http://cryptome.org

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 11:39 AM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there can be more than one place for that its ok

look the govt's are all just freaked because there's no readily identifiable "gatekeepers" in these scenarios anymore - the scale doesn't allow it. they find the prospect of dealing with a bunch of anonymous idiots much more terrifying than dealing with a handful of publishers, who represented a known quantity and could be leaned on/negotiated with/cajoled/bribed, etc

xp

just sayin like

in either case, i've always been pretty skeptical of the whole web 2.0 "do our work for us" media model

"gatekeepers" (i.e. artisans) do more than hold back information, they present it in a way that has an impact

or at least they should

i'm just a little worried that if "well wikileaks isn't REAL journalism" gains traction as a salient point in the unfolding fiasco (and it isn't one, TH, sorry), that it will be leveraged by lawmakers as a way to ram draconian anti-internet legislation through.

i think this was once referred to in the old, decrepit, discredited world of newsgathering as "don't become the story"

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 11:29 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it is you know the old, decrepit, discredited world of news gathering that decides what becomes the story - painting dude as a preening media whore while covering the wikileaks story 1mx more than the content of the leaks is somewhat rich

like i don't really care if wikileaks and blogs are bad journalism (i prefer the old-fashioned stuff, like you), they serve a purpose. and if a false legal distinction is made between anonymous wags on the internet and noble reporters in the newspaper, then we're heading for trouble.

haha cr?m i'm not saying that trad news orgs are covering this particularly well!

gbx what purpose do you think these particular cable leaks serve? or purposeS, if you like. speaking for myself, i think they COULD have served many specific purposes - shining a light on US relations with Yemen, for example - but it's pretty clear that their M.O. has diluted the impact of that potential purpose - perhaps even defused it as an issue - which is a shame

you know what, i'm really less interested in an inverted pyramid with a few culled quotes from interviews than i am in reading transcripts of those interviews. depends on the kind of story, sure. i really don't like this idea that the journalist sheds light but a data dump is... too much light to handle? maybe, maybe not, in both cases

ugh, i really don't want to watch it again, but CNN had some talking head ish between mccain's one-time campaign advisor (a brunette lady with v white teeth) and a dude from the guardian, and the mccain lady's way of describing journalism was....revealing.

...and now i can't find it on CNN, but when asked about the reporter's role (w/r/t finding stories in the cables) she said something, and i'm paraphrasing, like "well they've got to go out there and talk to people and understand the issues and explain the issues to their readers." just totally glossed over the bit about journalism reporting the facts.

and i realized that that is kinda how loads and loads of people in america, at least, see the role of journalism. don't tell me what's happening, tell me about ~the issues~. don't say "this is this," tell me what's an issue, what's making people talk.

If the Abu Gharib photos/videos had been dumped instead of a half-dozen selected photos...

::takes a data dump::

gbx what purpose do you think these particular cable leaks serve? or purposeS, if you like. speaking for myself, i think they COULD have served many specific purposes - shining a light on US relations with Yemen, for example - but it's pretty clear that their M.O. has diluted the impact of that potential purpose - perhaps even defused it as an issue - which is a shame

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 10:51 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

hey tracer, i'm not doing this again. we've done the "what purpose do you think these serve?" thing a couple times already, and, as a question, it misses the point entirely.

(i prefer the old-fashioned stuff, like you)

― kanellos (gbx), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 11:48 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

rmde - i prefer the old-fashioned stuff where no one ever looked at the media and said hey wtf r u doin, u know awesome stuff like the wash post editorial page and cnn - sry to interrupt yr charlie rose episode circa 2005 but this isnt an either/or preposition - new media/crazy revolutionaries like wikileaks add to the richness of the mediascape - the old dudes are still around complaining abt how shitty their holiday parties are now or whatever AND theres all this new stuff

Curious, how people suddenly have an opinion about what real news is when the discussion is about WikiLeaks while Fox News has existed for years.

ya fox news NEVER gets discussed

forgot the rmde after that

hey tracer, i'm not doing this again. we've done the "what purpose do you think these serve?" thing a couple times already, and, as a question, it misses the point entirely.

woops - worry to have missed it the first time around! i don't accept there's one "point" to this thread though, or that i'm missing it

worry = Sorry

no, i just like it when someone reads through all the information for me, and writes an intelligent story about it, i'm a busy man, etc. xp to icey

u mean like a blog

tbh i thought this was an example of a trad news org "doing it rite":
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

there is still nothing about wikileaks keeping people from writing intelligent stories about it though

http://gawker.com/5708238/richard-cohen-a-journalists-job-is-to-keep-the-governments-secrets

http://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpghttp://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpghttp://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpg
http://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpghttp://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpghttp://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/12/126x100_custom_1291740732564_richardcohen2.jpg
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wikileaks.tumblr.com

tumblrleaks or gtfo

tumblring dice

in any case, TH, the purposes they COULD have served are still available for, uh, serving. that assange and his MO have overshadowed things for now doesn't mean that ppl can't go on to sift through everything for 'real stories'

the opportunity hasn't been lost, just deferred. which, i guess, is why i think the question that you (and balls, and shakey, and history mayne) asked about "well WHY this, WHY now" is irrelevant because, you know, there's 250k documents out there for you or your peers to go and read to find the answer. what's more important, ~to me~, is that our elected officials appear to be gearing up for a coordinated dismantling of how sites like wikileaks may function in the future, which will in turn directly influence how boring old trad news conducts business. that assange may have misfired with this release, that he's a self-important d-bag, etc, really seems secondary

WikiLeaks means doing so not gonna happen research on war photos.

ok gbx & sonderangerbot, so - what about down the line? can't important stories come out of this? stories that rile public opinion? stories that MATTER?

the key for me is this: a leak on a single topic is a PEG. the only journalistic institution who doesn't need a peg is seymour hersh. and possibly the utne reader. everybody else needs one. even if the events in question (say, concerning russian pipelines, or secret military bases in yemen) occurred six months ago, the leak itself is an event - a peg - that warrants being written about. so you hang the actual contents of the leak on that peg.

two months from now, there is no peg.

the argument here - that i appear to have adopted as my own - is not about morality or ethics or anything like that. it's about artfulness.

i guess i don't know how to answer your question? that the peg is being lost because assange is the story and the content of the cables isn't is easily as much the fault of the traditional news orgs decision to frame it that way as it is assange's own desire for the spotlight.