I've been thinking, like everyone else about the implications of Wikileakery. It suddenly occurred to me as I was reading an article in the NYT about details of the purloined letters how hypocritical the Times is. I wonder exactly how they explain themselves.
As a semi-regular listener to Dan Carlin, I know that there was an earthquake in the world of journalism back at the trial of William Kennedy Smith in 1991. You may recall that the star witness against Smith had her face masked by a blue dot to protect her anonymity. Well one day one of the cameras malfunctioned or somehow caused the blue dot to disappear and some enterprising journalist took advantage of the situation and identified the witness. The earthquake happened when other news organizations published the results without independently verifying the identification. They simply cited the enterprising journalist's scoop and published the discovery in their own copy. The story was simply too hot not to, or so they said. According to Carlin, this marked the beginning of the end of journalistic integrity and why most newspapers don't have so much original content.
I've always noticed the extent to which AP reports have infiltrated the old media. And what ever happened to Reuters and United Press International? Somehow, newspaper staffs have gotten outsourced and a great deal of breaking news comes not as exclusives to newspaper organizations, but from the AP squad. This state of affairs is particularly galling when it comes to the reporting of conflict. There may be onerous burdens placed on journalists reporting embedded with troops, but at least they can be first hand witnesses. When only a few proprietary journalists report for many newspapers through this method of citation, the end result is that a few facts become a lot of editorial spin.
The blogosphere portended to offer the perfect solution from having grown up as nothing but unleveraged individuals doing the talking. Any blogger seeing something at their ground zero could be a credible witness and they wouldn't be subject to the economic pressures of buying stories from news services to compensate for low advertising revenues. It turned out however that bloggers had some of the same lazy tendencies of news organizations, they just cited the words of some other writer without doing independent fact checking. Of course it wasn't the matter of facts or corruption of journalistic integrity that bothered the big newspapers, it was the nerve of these bloggers to take readership away from the old media. Thus a battle was born.
Today the NYT is not sending its own reporters to embassies all over the world to report on the work and status of American diplomats. It is using the stolen notes provided by Julian Assange's Wikileak organization. This organization has almost instantly acquired the status and standing of Reuters and the Associated Press. Why? Ultimately for the same reason the blogosphere has credibility - it all represents first hand accounts by individual writers at their own ground zeros. But if anybody can claim that their work has been inappropriately cited, surely the prima facia case would be that presented by a diplomat whose cable was stolen by PFC Bradley Manning, the military stool pigeon now in the brig for his heinous operation.
I'm sure that the New York Times has a sophisticated consequentialist rationale for publishing this stolen property, but there has clearly been an egregious violation of integrity and ethics. I cannot find a way to respect any claims that paper might inveigh against bloggers.
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