Is This the Future of Journalism? Why Wikileaks matters.

[laststeamtrain]

Is This the Future of Journalism?
Why Wikileaks matters.
BY JONATHAN STRAY | APRIL 7, 2010

This week marked the international coming-out party for a new media organization that could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007.

"There was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm from above," says Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has watched thousands of hours of aerial footage of Iraq.


The video, seen through the perspective of the Apache gun camera, captures a dark moment in the Iraq war. As the American airmen chuckle over the body count, it also amounts to a damning indictment of war culture. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response.

True to its promise to release complete source material, Wikileaks has posted the full 38-minute gun camera video on YouTube. But the focus of its Monday press conference was an annotated, 19-minute edited version, published on the site collateralmurder.com. It opens with a quote from British provocateur-cum-journalist George Orwell:

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. "

<snip>

Wikileaks' editors are definitely outspoken, but they can't quite be accused of partisanship. They released the evidence of toxic waste dumping, which The Guardian had been barred from running, but also posted the so-called "climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, mere weeks before the Copenhagen talks. They've also leaked the confidential creditor list of collapsed Icelandic Bank Kaupthing, Australia's secret blacklist of censored URLs, and more than 500,000 pager messages from New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/06/is_this_the_future_of_journalism

[HillbillyBob]

1. The world needs Wikileaks!

I went to my bank account to see if I could shake loose some for them..just ain't there.

[time_has_come]

2. The future of journalism? "upend sacred cows of traditional jouralism"?? hardly

I know everyone loves to hate journalists, but the reality is Wikileaks is merely a portal for raw information. They do some analysis, seemingly.
But who will now do the legwork and talk to various people and ask questions of the powers that be and churn out more information and (perhaps) insight on stories like this situation? Wikileaks doesn't pursue news...they wait there for it to come to show up on the doorstep.

[laststeamtrain]

3. Well, there are journalists who attempt to do the things you say ...

but there are others who don't.

A healthy news diet contains some raw, some cooked. It's the nutritionally empty that's to be avoided.