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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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/

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... 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...

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.

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.

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.

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