Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Assange's mom says Wikileaks founder suffering [View all]struggle4progress
(118,273 posts)by the carload
Anybody familiar with the history of American realpolitick can understand why there might be a certain amount of international schadenfreude associated with the Wikileaks cable releases. It's always fun to see the-powers-that-be smecked in the schnozz. But that, in itself, doesn't prove anything: it doesn't prove that the cable releases were important whistle-blowing or a brave step towards openness
When the cables first came out, and people starting oohing-and-aahing that "We wouldn't have known about this except for Wikileaks," I did a few little experiments, randomly grabbing a dozen supposedly "new" stories from the Wikileaks cable coverage and searching for what I could have learned about the stories just from available news coverage BEFORE Wikileaks -- and in all the cases I examined, I could have gotten plenty of information from pre-existing web news reports, and I expect much of the info would have been better than the reports from the embassies
There's also the fact that careful principled selection of information matters. A good reporter doesn't just grab a lot of documents to dump on you: some effort is required to understand what is being shown, and how it ties into contexts simply not revealed by the documents themselves. Such editorial work is even more important when there are serious human rights issues and people's life and liberty might be at stake. There's no reason to think Wikileaks has ever had the expertise, the humility, or the patience necessary to engage in the process of evaluating the information and trying to make a coherent story from the leaks. This is partly because Wikileaks actually has no coherent philosophy and analysis: it works from the anarchistic-libertarian stance that everybody should be able to know everything. That may sound attractive in the abstract, until one begins to realize that it is sometimes adult to ask: who exactly is wanting to know what, and why do they want to know it?