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Comment by Rod | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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