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Comment by nkassis | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading. Reading emails out of context and without knowing if they've been altered is probably not the best way to get a full picture. The value add of media looking at them is they can also go and get other sources to add context or to corroborate what they are reading in the wikileaks releases. Sources which aren't available to everyone. It's also easy to be fooled into seeing things as nefarious which are in the end benign when given context.

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Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I would find something in them to have him hanged.

... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them, only with ten thousand times the ammunition the Cardinal (apocryphally) asked for. The online mob has been accusing (eg) Podesta and his correspondents of all kinds of insane things - from corruption & arms dealing to satanism & child abduction - based on the flimsiest of cherry-picked quotes, even when the context (beyond the leaks, within them, even in the very same email sometimes) showed without doubt that their claims were obvious bunk.

And Assange merrily fed into that: drawing spurious connections on his twitter feed; linking/retweeting the fever dreams of naked partisans; and dragging out a single dump into an episodic drip-fed spectacle, all the better to whip his fans into an inquisitorial vigilante frenzy.

"wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading"? I can't argue with that - except perhaps to say it's far too charitable.

There's a lot of stuff in wikileaks that merits investigation but the MSM never did their job. Just wholesale dismissal from comedianchors like John Oliver. Not surprising that the MSM were asleep at the wheel when it came to predicting the outcome, or that most of the country no longer trusts them.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...

>... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them

But why do you think that the whole internet wants to play the part of Richelieu, everyone is allowed to choose the role they want and wikileaks does not hide the context of the emails, everyone is perfectly able to check the whole correspondence. If anything the mass media is hiding the context because of their format and time limits.

Wikileaks is being unbiased by claiming to be entirely unbiased on what they choose to release (yes, they CHOOSE what they want to release, what to save for insurance, etc.) yet not acknowledging the dangerous false equivalency of saying that this system implies there is no possible way that the other party would do the same things. Until we have equal information about both sides, this is dangerous. Wikileaks gets to be the unfair arbiter of truth while claiming total transparency that we know doesn't exist.

Oh I'm not saying that they could not be faked or altered. And to be honest when you have a supposedly accurate track record like this it's a perfect brewing storm for someone to come in and exploit it.

But dismissing them as Russian hacking didn't really give a lot of people the choice to make up for themselves. Yes I believe according to wikileaks that the DNC colluded with media and fact checking orgs and pushed their agenda too far. I read the information and made up my mind. So when someone points to Politifact again I'll do the same. Not saying they can't be saved but it's the idea of looking at it as doctrine from the start with a stamp of 'True' or 'False' that I don't like. Things are never that simple.

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