Wikileaks: the World's First Stateless News Organization | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks: the World's First Stateless News Organization

journalism.nyu.edu

69 pointsFlemlord33 comments

It sounds whimsical but the headline of this article helped me gain a new perspective on Wikileaks. I probably shouldn’t see them as this supposed holier than thou and perfect organization which fails miserably at being just that (especially in the wake of the Collateral Murder video).

They are just something like a news organization, with their own biases, their own screw ups (which should be criticized), but they still provide a valuable service to society. The headline helped me come to terms with my ultimately unrealistic expectations of Wikileaks.

I came to the some conclusion after the Collateral Murder video - WikiLeaks is a news organization, which gathers, curate, and sometimes editorialize their content. The only difference is that Internet allows them to be outside the jurisdiction of any concrete state. But they have their own bias and their own agenda, just like any other media.

As you said, they provide valuable service to society, but we still need to watch them closely like any other organization. Anyway, what they do I think is positive and it blazes a trail for others. I am now looking forward for WikiLeaks competitor. ;-)

I think it's very dangerous to define and describe WikiLeaks as 'a news organization'.

News organizations curate and editorialize content - I hope that WikiLeaks doesn't editorialize their content (I know Julian Assange has talked about 'getting PR for leakers' as a motive, which is concerning).

We're still working out what WikiLeaks is as their model is basically something new for the mainstream world that they have not seen before.

But Wikileaks does curate and (to a lesser extent) editorialize. I don’t think that’s a bad things. News organizations without any curation are a pipe dream.

Not an entirely impossible pipe dream though - I'm sure it would be feasible to blur the boundaries between news publishing and anarchic internet fora by algorithmically relegate misleading or non-newsworthy submissions based purely on user preferences.

I hope that WikiLeaks doesn't editorialize their content (I know Julian Assange has talked about 'getting PR for leakers' as a motive, which is concerning).

Wasn't it wikileaks which added the somewhat dubious "interpretation" captions etc to the video which they chose to call "collateral murder"?

News organizations curate and editorialize content.

I guess if you take the Orwellian interpretation.

Perhaps the original interpretation fits them best because they just provide the bare documents as the do not editorialize. In other words "new organizations are organization that do nothing but provide news".

Of course editorializing takes places when selecting the content. But hopefully the "wiki" part of "wikileaks" is emphasized enough to that everything is available to everyone and the readers get to decide that is more newsworthy for them.

I hope that WikiLeaks doesn't editorialize their content

AFAIK, they don't. For example, in the case of the Afghanistan war logs, they provided the logs to the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel and left the editorializing up to them.

Sure news organizations curate and editorialize content... they ask "is this the official party line?" If the answer is no, they don't print it.

Some do. Ok, most do.

I spent 6 years working for BBC News and I didn't see that happen there. But it's a non-corporate news provider.

I really doubt that many consciously ask whether something fits "the party line". They mostly introduce bias subconsciously in their decisions about what is and isn't "news".

Politician A accidentally says something stupid and it's ignored. Politician B accidentally says something stupid and it's "Politician B's Latest Gaffe" on the front page.

(Why yes, I do have a specific Politican B in mind, but shan't mention any names to avoid off-topic discussions.)

Anyway, it's odd that you would think that being a "non-corporate news provider" would insulate the BBC from bias. What about the natural groupthink which tends to accumulate in organizations insulated from real-world concerns?

I wonder when and where? I'm generally a big fan of the BBC but it's not completely above the fray.

Thinking back to times I've been living in the UK and the country has gone into war (most recently Iraq), the BBC reported on the political leadup reasonably even-handedly, but as soon as the shooting started Paxman took a break from Newsnight and instead we got Peter Snow running around a giant table with toy tanks on it (Americans: you switch on expecting PBS but get CNN instead).

Whereas I would, on the other hand, say the BBC was anti-war biased from day one. Which just goes to prove that "unbiased" journalism is impossible, since people only percieve bias when it disagrees with their own biases.

It's worth noting that even wikipedia doesn't attempt to be "unbiased" but makes the weaker claim to have a "neutral point of view". And it can only achieve that state via continuous edit wars between people holding all major points of view. And even then it's only an ideal, not a description of the state of wikipedia at any given time.

"BBC was anti-war biased from day one"

My recollection is that the BBC was not biased against previous wars - and I can recall the Falklands & the first Gulf War fairly well.

However, for the Second Gulf War they did keep asking "why are we going to war?" - which as it turns out was a perfectly valid question as the justifications for the war (and especially for UK involvement) ranged from rather weak arguments (Saddam is bad) through to outright lies (involvement with 9/11 or WMD).

So if the BBC is biased it seems to be biased in favour of the truth.

People perceive bias in the absence of bias. I remember in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, the local paper ran with the headline "Four More Years" and a smiling picture from Bush's victory party.

People wrote in and complained that it was a biased headline. They had imagined that the editor who wrote that wrote it with a heavy heart - even though Bush supporters themselves were chanting "four more years" to rally the troops at campaign events.

It's sort of amazing that an amateur and somewhat half-assed journalist club is getting this much attention for just reporting the news.

Of course, it's because "real journalists" no longer report the news or investigate anything. They just parrot the party line. In a world full of Pravda clones, an amateurish guerilla operation doing actual journalism captures the front pages.

Really? "Real journalists" no longer report the news? So Filkins, Constable, Rohde... the major newsgathering organizations aren't sending people to Kandahar, Peshawar, and out to frontiers, where they aren't being kidnapped or killed? Instead: the guys that relay files, out of context, directly to the web for commentary --- those are the real reporters?

Pants are shirts!

Read Kaplan's bit in Slate today about the real significance (or lack thereof) of the stuff Wikileaks just dumped:

http://www.slate.com/id/2261780/

... the major newsgathering organizations aren't sending people to Kandahar, Peshawar, and out to frontiers, where they aren't being kidnapped or killed?

That is precisely why there are very few "real" journalists. Because it is dangerous and expensive to send people to investigate half-way across the world. That is why most (at least) American news organizations just pass along un-edited propaganda released by Dept. of State.

Often they'll write "an offical from Dept. of State said..<blah>" and people are so used to hearing that, they believe <blah> automatically. It is an official, it is from a major news org and from Dept. of State -- wow, it couldn't possibly be a lie.

There are very few honest and idependent news organizations with "real" journalists. News companies are not there to provide news for money, they are there to sell audiences to their advertising client and make money mostly from that.

Even the military "embedded" journalists are "embedded" into one side. It is rather naive to expect them to be objective.

I will highlight again, that there are few brave journalists who risk /risked their lives and died in order to provide accurate reports of the situation. But those are very rare exceptions.

Now you provide a link to "Slate" where Kaplan claims that Wikileaks is not real "journalism" because the news wasn't shocking enough and of course everyone should go to slate.com where real journalists report.

Let's take a look at a couple of his quotes:

These problems were, in fact, the main reasons behind the new strategy that Obama put in place in December 2009—after the period covered by all of the WikiLeaks documents, which date from 2004-09.

That is true because ... that is what Obama said. It is the standard claim being broadcast from the White House now -- "Obama is already handling this!". I've heard this already on the radio and read in other sources. Note how Kaplan just assumes that as the truth and directly quotes the White House. So if Obama has already fixed all this, can we see some results or some documents, some proof that situation got better?

Let's look at another quote:

Journalism, the old saw has it, is the first draft of history. The WikiLeaks documents amount to the first notes of a journalistic story, and incomplete notes at that.

He seems to be saying that everyone instead of getting the un-edited data, should get the "filtered" data, interpreted by someone. Someone who would put the "right spin" on things, perhaps.

I am not surprised. He is just defending his profession and his modus operandi. He sees journalists as writing history and here is some renegade kids with a website disrupting the age old process. Bypassing all the filters so carefully put in place over the years. I can see how he would be less than sympathetic.

If I remember correctly, weapons inspectors were sent to Iraq, they found nothing, and then the U.S. invaded a sovereign nation based on lies. Fox News had reporters embedded with the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I remember them reporting that "WMD sites had been secured"! It's all a circus. You can have all the journalists you want embedded with ground units in Afghanistan, but if the editors back in NYC or Washington D.C. are constrained, then you won't get the real story. In other words, your argument is a joke.

And if you want to cite a credible source of info on these issues, cite STRATFOR's article:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100726_wikileaks_and_afghan...

Be very careful with stratfor. I was a subscriber back before and during the Iraq War, and as the war progressed it was clear that their information, as in-depth as it sounds, mostly reveals itself as BS in the long run. One example relavant to your comment was that they were among the worst at pushing obviously and flagrantly false WMD stories even many months into the war. But that's just the start; their seemingly detailed and insightful articles were ultimately wrong about just about every little detail they contained. It became perfectly clear that their sources came from the same ranks as the mainstream media's (the US military and a variety of polically motivated officials), the sources were just more obscure and lower level. Stratfor might have done a 180 in the past couple years, but I highly, highly doubt it.

The people getting kidnapped and killed are not "embedded" with military units and they're not simply parroting some PR guy's talking points. They're using fixers to get guided tours of Baluchistan to meet Taliban leaders.

The people reporting from Peshawar --- literally putting 'Peshawar' in their dateline, like the WaPo has been doing for years --- are not embedded with military units; the US military doesn't have units with embeddings in western Pakistan. But there those reporters are, inconveniently damaging your argument.

Embedded or not, they still work for an American newspaper, which means that their stories can be censored via legal bullying. By contrast, WikiLeaks can't be stopped by the powers that be.

WikiLeaks' war logs contain 100s of short reports from troops on the ground. Now the question may be: what is more truthful, a platoon leader's report, or a wild-roaming journalist's report? The platoon leader must please his commanding officer, the journalist must please his boss. They both are constrained.

Yes, there are journalists who were in Afghanistan / Pakistan back in the 1980s during the war with the USSR who are visiting Taliban leaders. They can go where no U.S. soldiers can go, for sure. But is that bringing forth that much truth? Sure, it's valuable to listen to the enemy's point of view, but don't we all know already what the Taliban want?

You're forgetting that self-censorship is sometimes the greatest pressure on editorial staff. These newspapers's primary duty, unless their staff have signed up to the Munich convention of 1971, could be seen to be to advertisers, and then to industry regulators who they're hoping to get some kind of booster shot/protection aginst nu meedja from; that, at least, is not the case at Wikileaks.

Self-censorship is also driven by editorial staff purposely biasing their reporting to reflect the political biases of their readership. There's a sizeable segment of society that thinks that reporting on alleged abuses in Afghanistan is akin to terrorist-sympathising.

It sounds callous, but what do I care if somebody gets kidnapped and killed? That doesn't add any value to journalism in itself. All I care about is what ends up in the paper I'm reading.

His point is, getting hard news is hard, comment is cheap.

Well the guy who leaked the Iraq video to wikileaks is in prison now. I think that is quite a high price. Not many journalists if any are prosecuted from their own state for reporting what the power that be does not want to hear. Though that said, Dr. Kelly in Britain paid a high price too.

> Not many journalists if any are prosecuted from their own state for reporting what the power that be does not want to hear.

I don't quite get where are you coming from with this. A good deal, maybe half of the political prisoners and political assassination victims worldwide are journalists. Hell, in my homeland at least one journalist mysteriously disappeared and a few went through the prison.

That's a good point. I meant in the western democratic world like US, UK etc.

Of course they do report some news. I think the main point is the way they report them and how they have become very political. Also, I think another worry is how they all report the same thing.

And the biggest worry is how sometimes they do not report what is really important and should be reported. I do not see how after the Iraq siaga anyone at all can trust the press.

Journalism seems no longer to have become about reporting, but forming opinions, or calling it for what it really is, propaganda one way or another. This is very different from being given the hard facts and allowed to judge for yourself. That is why wikileaks is disruptive, has a lot of public support, and people want to kiss the hand of Julian.

I would note that the NPR interview referenced and linked within this article is very interesting and informative; I recommend giving it a listen.

I wonder what ever happened with that Wikileaks "insider" writing to Cryptome about how they were planning on shutting the place down?

Am I wrong, or does this give us every reason to disbelieve the guy, given that they've been working on this huge leak for quite a while now?

Did anyone else initially think this was related to functional programming?

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