If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

http://gigaom.com/2011/11/07/if-wikileaks-is-dying-then-the-nyt-is-partly-to-blame

by nextparadigms • 15 years ago

94 34 15 years ago

vph2• 15 years ago

Reading this article several times, I really failed to see a clear logic from the author as to why the supposed dying of Wikileaks is the NYT's fault.

tedunangst• 15 years ago

I think the theory is that WL was a competing news organization with the potential to replace NYT, but NYT hasn't rolled over and died, therefore blocking WL from taking its seat on the throne.

mquinlan• 15 years ago

Agreed - it seems like more of a failed attempt at a namedrop, when more of the "blame" should be directed towards the public. If Times readers as a whole lose express interest in WikiLeaks while Assange is dealing with legal issues and many other whistleblowing sites (OpenLeaks.org as an example) haven't seem to been releasing any high-profile documents, isn't that just more the reason for the Times to focus efforts elsewhere?

mathewi3• 15 years ago

As the author of the post, maybe I can try and clear that up: my point was that while we have all failed to some extent -- by not supporting WikiLeaks and protesting things like the PayPal blockade and Amazon deletion and the government's dubious case -- the New York Times has failed by not using its national media platform to protest those things and their impact on free speech and freedom of the press. And my argument about why they didn't do that is in part that the NYT sees WikiLeaks as competition. Hope that helps.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

What about the people among us who don't think that Wikileaks is a good thing to support?

What if there are more people who think that than message board sentiment analysis would lead you to believe?

What if the New York Times simply doesn't agree with your take --- ok, the popular take on places like HN --- about Wikileaks?

grandalf• 15 years ago

[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than simply downvote?]

In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom.

It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs and desire to please those with political power.

Think about when the last time the NY Times published any remotely controversial investigative journalism... oh yeah it was the articles that supported the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Strangely, the Times (a good but ardently neoconservative) paper still manages to fool progressives into thinking that it offers a sympathetic voice. Sadly the pressures of competing in the online world have left the paper with no choice but to sell off its journalistic integrity year after year.

If anything, one would hope that a paper like the Times would have taken a skeptical but journalistically sharp look at the leaked info and would have held off on the ad hominem attack on the Wikileaks founder, at least until some evidence was offered in support of the allegations against him.

And no, I don't think the total buffoonery written by Krugman, Dowd, and Herbert counts for any progressiveness points. If anything the three are a sideshow act with no relevance to the issues that matter.

starwed• 15 years ago

You're downvoted for pretending controversial opinions (that the nytimes is a neoconservative stronghold) are obvious and need no justification.

ars2• 15 years ago

"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection"

No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up.

This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange doesn't like. No thank you. Wikileaks should not get to choose what to leak. Either leak everything you are given (after redaction of course), or nothing, do not selectively choose who to leak against.

Once you do that you become a political organization.

bandushrew3• 15 years ago

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection.

We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like.

What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileaks should have redacted <whatever> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced by our government as soon as it suited them.

ars2• 15 years ago

> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced

I think it's for two reasons - a: They are not that silent - they released everything they had and the US couldn't do anything. So there isn't all that much to be outraged about.

And b: I don't think that most people actually support them (their goals) anymore. I certainly don't. I did, but not anymore.

Personally I think their leaks harmed things, and helped nothing. Especially the ones about Abbas. If people had actually believe the leaks were real and not US propaganda (yes I know how funny that sounds to you) those leaks could have easily started another Palestinian civil war (well a Fata vs Hamas war anyway).

You may argue that the leaks actually did help, but that's not the perception I have. Maybe I'm manipulated by the media, could be. But it doesn't matter - if I am, then so are lots more. And that's why people are not more outraged.

damoncali• 15 years ago

Perhaps it is because the very concept of wikileaks is flawed from the start no matter your political persuasion. If it is successful, information will be out there. Powerful entities (including, but not limited to the US Government) can do one of at least things to counter that.

1) Drive actual secrets further underground and out of reach of wikileaks.

2) Use the leaks to spread disinformation/propaganda to their advantage.

3) Use violence, lies, and intimidation to help "shape" the form of the leaks.

It was doomed from the start. It was either a politically motivated propaganda machine, in which case it's fair game; or it was a lofty, academic pursuit, in which case it was a game.

lotharbot• 15 years ago

> "WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity"

WL and its supporters like to call it an "intelligence agency" (Assange himself has said this). That's more than just a "journalistic entity".

Why is anyone surprised when various governments treat WL like an intelligence agency?

asdfasdghasdf4• 15 years ago

I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't).

Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the embassy cable leak (http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html). Of course, they haven't done anything interesting since then, either. Look at their own charts, and you see that their income is heavily correlated with major releases (etc. Collateral Murder in April, Embassy cables in December) and their current donations don't look that far removed from, say, September or May 2010.

Even their own financial statements (http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-Projekt04_de...) say that most of their money came wire transfer (which is still possible and fully legal). This is definitely more an issue of people not wanting to donate than it is being not able to. Obviously, the best way to raise more funds would be to do more high-profile work; WikiLeaks is choosing to shut down all their high profile work.

You say the government shut them down, but in fact they shut themselves down, as your parent comment mentions. They shut down their super-useful, award-winning site (eventually to be put back up as a read-only archive at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks) and re-purposed themselves entirely to hyping up the five things they got from Brad Manning. Now, they're out of money, they're out of juicy Brad Manning leaks, they haven't even been accepting anything new since they shut themselves down, and so they're gonna drum up their little government-conspiracy thing that they do very, very well, to try to raise some more money.

dantheman• 15 years ago

Journalists @ the Guardian released the underacted cables.

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/31/wikileaks-guardian-journali...

mindslight2• 15 years ago

> It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

If the NYT meets the standards of "journalism", Wikileaks sure as hell does. Better to accidentally release unredacted information than the government sanitized press releases of the NYT.

> It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

Is this not a big part of the campaign to discredit Wikileaks? Focus on the person to hide the idea. Ideas have to be reckoned with; people can be written off ad hominem.

I'm not trying to say Wikileaks is even near perfect. The main point is that the NYT, which many see as authoritative, consistently avoids mentioning the implications of what is happening to Wikileaks.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

When people say the New York Times does "journalism", one of the unspoken connotations of that is that they are paying actual highly-qualified people to travel across the world, often into war zones and scenes of chaos and disaster, to record and report events firsthand.

It is awfully hard to even formulate an argument that the New York Times isn't a journalistic organization.

On the other hand, it is not as difficult to formulate an argument that Wikileaks staff aren't journalists. You are very unlikely to agree with those arguments, and I respect that. I have a lot of friends who ardently support Wikileaks and think no less of them for it.

But I have a problem with putting Wikileaks on the exact same level as The New York Times. They simply aren't on the same level.

lwat• 15 years ago

Who made Wikileaks about Assange himself? Certainly not Wikileaks?

knowtheory• 15 years ago

Really?

Assange did literally ransom the full wikileaks document dump (including the secret cables) for his personal well-being legal immunity.

If the goal was to create a distributed organization w/o obvious single points of failure, Assange certainly did nothing to guarantee those ends.

ternaryoperator2• 15 years ago

There will be many causes for Wikileaks' death (if in fact it does in fact die). None more damaging though than the damage Wikileaks did to itself. Leaving unredacted the names of informants who were later executed for providing the very information Wikileaks posted clinched its fate IMO.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

[citation needed]

I haven't read any information regarding sources being executed.

ternaryoperator2• 15 years ago

I stand corrected. There's no proof any source has been killed, but the Taliban has repeatedly vowed to hunt down and "punish" the sources not redacted in the Wikileaks docs. Many links on that on the Web.

rrrazdan• 15 years ago

The truth even if it causes some harm, is always infinitely better than a lie, even if it helps someone. That is my position.

If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

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