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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

>Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".

I honestly can't believe why anyone thought this after he published the first thing that put Wikileaks on the map, the embarrassing Collateral Murder video.

It's funny because before that came out, I considered donating money to Wikileaks because I thought it'd be more like an organization like Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people were seduced by the name "Wikileaks" piggybacking off the credibility and mission of Wikipedia.

I guess no one had any critical thinking skills or were prone to conspiracy because everyone from progressives to libertarians started eating everything he did up.

EDIT: Wow just did a search on HN to see what people said back then about it and it seems a few people had the same take I did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243842

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You don't think Collateral Murder should've been released?

No I don't think an organization that was ostensibly trying "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour" should have published the highly edited and misleading video which was packaged to go viral. That told me everything I needed to know about his intellectual honesty and what to expect from Wikileaks. I guess no one else had the same takeaway.

That video clearly showed disgusting and murderous behavior of US armed forces. They opened fire on and killed a passing motorist who stopped to help a wounded individual. Are you aware that that is what happens in the video?

It made it clear to the world that American armed forces could never be trusted to behave honorably in a very different country full of brown people that they think are “terrorists”.

He editorialized that video to hell and back, removing audio which humanized the chopper pilots, condensing 40 minutes into 2, and a whole bunch of other editorial tricks to make the people getting murdered more sympathetic.

The only difference was that it was under a Republican administration and Democrats were all for it.

They released an edited and unedited version, as you should know if you indeed watched it.

As far as the ethics of it go, it is pretty typical for media not to air a forty minute video in a one minute news segment. Perhaps the other thirty eight minutes of the killers just chatting was more newsworthy though.

I absolutely agree with you and him.

What I find distasteful is that the people who were cheering him on when he was doing it to Republicans are now calling him a Russian asset for doing it to democrats.

And vice versa for the Republicans.

> Democrats were all for it.

Er, no, they generally weren't. WikiLeaks support on the left at the time was mostly from the far left that sees the Democrats as virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans. WikiLeaks has never had support (except maybe in the context of the Trump campaign) from any substantial portion of either major US party.

Wikipedia is extremely biased.

[citation needed]

Yes but that's inherent in how Wikipedia works. Wikileaks was just Julian Assange (and whoever else worked with him).

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