WikiLeaks has been around for a while, but this year—beginning in April, when the site posted a video showing the death of two Reuters employees in a U.S. helicopter attack, through November, when mainline journalism organizations began releasing stories based on a trove of some 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, stories that are still rolling out—the world took notice. Is WikiLeaks a boon to transparency and freedom of information or a threat to U.S. interests? Is it a journalistic entity or something altogether new?
In a new Columbia Journalism Review podcast, CJR’s Joel Meares talks with deputy editor Clint Hendler about how WikiLeaks is upending American assumptions about journalism and free speech.
Listen to the episode below, and be sure to check out the CJR podcast homepage on iTunes, where you can listen and subscribe for free. The first two episodes are up now, with many more to come.
The Editors ask: "Is WikiLeaks a boon to transparency and freedom of information or a threat to U.S. interests?"
That depends on your definition of "U.S. interests." When politicians and policy-makers speak of U.S. interests, they want you to think it means your interest, or the interest of "The American People." But in truth, it means the interests of the politicians, policy-makers, and other state-connected entities. (It goes back to the Hamiltonian invention of "the American interest," basically meaning the interest of the central state-connected elite.) In which case, the answer to the question is "both." And that is a good thing if you are interested in preserving and defending life, liberty, peace and prosperity (as opposed to expanding central power).
And on the topic of whether WikiLeaks is a journalistic outfit...
Journalistic legitimacy should not be determined by whether the news-bearer is accredited by elite institutions such as Columbia or the U.S. govt — or the way it vets, gathers, collates, narrates, editorializes, copy-edits, composes, edits, publishes, disseminates, etc. To any extent, bloggers, pamphleteers, town criers, and blog-commenters may be journalists. If the informer has committed a crime or "treason," let him be tried in a court of law and judged by his peers. But even if found guilty, it still doesn't mean that he was not a journalist or member of the free press.
And on the question of whether WikiLeaks is filling a void where the MSM utterly has failed...
The Internet and communication technology has had a negligible, if any, effect here. The AP, NYT, et al., have had the same access to the Internet as WikiLeaks or other non-establishment journalist, and have enjoyed incestuously privileged access to govt (and academic) sources (and documents); yet, unlike WikiLeaks, they have decided to act as the govt's partners, lapdogs, lickspittles, court historians, liars, etc.
All that said, I appreciated the podcast. Keep 'em coming!
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 4 Jan 2011 at 09:40 PM
Correction, graf 2: National interest, not American interest.
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 4 Jan 2011 at 09:48 PM