Comment by somenomadicguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenomadicguy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The first 1/2 of your argument: CIA. Let me be clear, I don't support Clinton, Trump, or anybody else, I feel you have to be an evil sociopath to even want to be a world leader.

I think he is just playing sides. Trump doesn't give a crap, but Hillary knows he's after her. Putin has shown an eager willingness to give asylum to Snowden, him, and anybody else. I just think he's a sociopathic narcissist who watched too many thrillers and wants to wield power against governments.

   - Strong willingness to work with mainstream news outlets to create high production quality investigative journalism (Assange has done all he possibly could).

In the beginning, sure, I'll admit you were right on this. The past year or two, however, wikileaks has failed to produce anything of substance. It's "leaks" (of Turkish dessert recipes) have been sloppy at best, irresponsible and dangerous at worst. Not even Fox would be as careless as he was with the personal data of millions of women in an islamist country. Sean Hannity isn't exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

  - Resilience to meddling by the many enemies one makes (Assange has done well with this).

Has he? He seems to be attempting to wield his power against his enemies. Is that resilience, or vendetta?

   - Reinforcing the strength and bias-free nature of the institution (Assange has made clear that he finds Trump and Hillary both despicable, yet this comment is ignored by many such as yourself).

His actions state otherwise. I'm not sure who posts more anti-clinton rhetoric, Trump or Assange. Lately Wikileaks' feed has have been emotional responses to criticisms and perceived sleights, and heavily biased character attacks on his perceived enemies. There hasn't actually been any journalism that I can see.

Assange has a problem with women. His character assaults against Clinton and journalist Zeynep Tukfeci are pretty good indicators of this.

> The past year or two, however, wikileaks has failed to produce anything of substance.

Is this due to Assange? Or due to the war on whistleblowers? Given the resource constraints of WL, Assange must choose between publishing unredacted information and not publishing at all.

If Assange had not reached out to the worldwide mainstream press, I'd fault him for releasing unredacted material. But the press (and shamefully, the NY Times in particular) has rebuffed Assange and been unwilling to produce investigative stories handed to them on a platter by Assange (via leaked info).

To understand this we must turn to the basic power relationship and realize that major news outlets are largely state propaganda outlets, or at least prefer to act in this role most of the time. Assange did not likely expect this. I certainly didn't, as it seems too cynical a view... of course the NY Times would want to publish details revealing corruption or lies committed by our most trusted officials...

It's easy to vilify Assange and to assume an emotional motive for everything he publishes. Assange's goal is the legitimization of Wikileaks and its maturation into a respected news institution. He cannot get there (especially given his resource constraints) by playing politics. While he does occasionally make a divisive comment, he generally lets the leaked documents speak (unredacted) for themselves.

> His character assaults against Clinton

Are you arguing that the information revealed by the DNC emails is not a reflection of very significant character flaws in Clinton?

> Is this due to Assange? Or due to the war on whistleblowers? Given the resource constraints of WL, Assange must choose between publishing unredacted information and not publishing at all.

Again, your argument is yet another conspiracy theory. You can't argue against this, because no matter what, it's the Cigarette Smoking Man in the background. And the resource-constraint argument is an excuse for sloppy, irresponsible journalism.

The argument that wikileaks is not at all affected by Assange's emotional and mental state seems to be an attempt to make him out to be an altruistic, infallible god, not a human .

Major news caters more towards the people that give them money, and they base their content choices on their sponsors.

It seems that every time Assange has a bowel movement, all of the major news sources write about it as front-page news, and immediately every comment is about how no major news outlet is reporting on wikileaks.

> Are you arguing that the information revealed by the DNC emails is not a reflection of very significant character flaws in Clinton?

I haven't read them all, so can you clue me into what they exposed about her directly in contrast to what they exposed about the DNC organization?

And were you aware of my other point, his attacks on Zeynep from the New York times? She pointed out the danger the leaks put women in. Instead of saying, "hey, that leak wasn't our fault, but mea culpa anyways, we're sorry". Then when she pointed out that if he'd had some Turks read the emails they'd have laughed and said "don't bother", he again went into a campaign of character assaults against her?

> your argument is yet another conspiracy theory

Not at all, neither of us knows what information was submitted to WL, so perhaps the issue is that nothing as significant as the war logs was submitted. We know for a fact that the US has significantly tightened up its infosec policies since Chelsea Manning's revelations. These are facts and no conspiracy theorizing is involved whatsoever. My friends who work for the Federal government would never even read this HN thread while at work, so there has been a legitimately chilling effect on the culture as well.

> sloppy, irresponsible journalism

Holding WL to some imaginary journalistic standard is absurd. It would be one thing if the NY Times got the story and overshadowed WL by publishing a carefully redacted, professional piece. But the major news outlets do not for the most part have systems in place for anonymous drop off of data, and simply do not report on much of what WL gets access to. If you ask me, that is the major journalistic failure. Can Assange, with a tiny team, copy edit and responsibly redact everything? Of course not, but we know from his previous releases that he strongly prefers to and that he is operating WL in survival mode at the moment due to harassment from some of the parties he's leaked information about.

> It seems that every time Assange has a bowel movement, all of the major news sources write about it as front-page news, and immediately every comment is about how no major news outlet is reporting on wikileaks.

This statement does not make sense. Assange is not Wikileaks, and Assange's personal failings are not Wikileaks. The stories which don't see much reporting are the actual factual content about corruption and misdeeds by government officials! The problem is that we get stories about Assange's personal details but not any real substance.

I'd rather not sidetrack this discussion into the content of the DNC emails, but would be happy to do so in a different thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com