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I am afraid the real world journalists don't care too much about Wikileak. I am afraid that's how I feel this way. To me, Wikileak is the real meat journalists, no speculation, no opinion, just information, data for people to process. But we don't want it, we want to read tldr;, one sentence is something I am interested to read about a topic. Journalists know that, they rather publish unchecked facts, as long as it grabs eyeballs. They want to force opinion, ideology to people. Can news be news, not opinions? I don't know. I am not going to anything related to this on mainstream news media I am sure.

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You would benefit a fair amount of reading Manufacturing Consent and Propaganda 1927 if you haven't, they will provide you with tools to verbalize your ideas and learn to better differentiate the media landscape

Manufacturing Consent (there's a documentary form of it too) changed my entire outlook on media. Highly recommend.

Short vid based on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M

I think traditional journalists generally are unsure what to make of / wary of Wikileaks.

Rather than a site willing to release anything.... Wikileaks, even from the early days they, seemed to craft their own narratives in a way that many journalists find uncomfortable.

Even in the earlier days of Wikileaks when they had a facebook page (not sure if they do anymore) they'd regularly announce an upcoming data dump and imply that it was very important and serious and imply what it was about .... then radio silence. They never would release anything on that topic...

If you asked on their page, your comment was deleted ... whey did they not release it? No word. Many of these weren't national security type situations and there was enough info that you knew they never released it ever, just radio silence.

I liked the idea of what I thought Wikileaks was early on, but it never was that, and I'm suspicious of their choices and etc. They seem as interested in crafting something, what I'm not sure, keeping their own secrets, as any state. Who really is Wikileaks, what are they up to, I wonder sometimes...

On the internet of course this is all or nothing. You either are for a thing and against everything deemed to be the polar opposite or the other way. It's hard to have nuanced discussions about these things but I think that grey area is where you see the concern from journalists.

Data is useless without context. If you don't understand what you're looking at. Its more like to do harm than good. Like how all those maga people watched people counting votes. They didn't understand how the process worked so they thought every little thing was election fraud.

Isn't it something how so many people seem to think they are more 'enlightened' than actual journalists on the Wikileaks issue?

I think if you were to ask a journalist, you might get a more realistic answer, and that is they see that the institution itself is probably compromised. Leaked information can still be valid, but as an organization itself they probably don't trust it as being unbiased, or exactly what it says it is.

Integrity is a super important part of journalism, it has to be constantly earned.

Did you miss that WikiLeaks met with Trump campaign staff that had close relations with russian secret services and then leaked DNC campaign mails so that right wing actors could make that into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory?

I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone.

They promised leaks on russian oligarchs that never happened. They promised to "bring down" Bank of America. They promised to release another video showing war crimes by the US that was never released. They criticized the release of the Panama Papers.

People who still support WikiLeaks are either lunatics or they tend to have right wing agenda of their own.

The BOA leak, and several others, got burned by that Daniel Dumbshit guy over some petty personal disputes on how Wikileaks was run. That's what the Benedict Cumberbatch movie was all about, told from the perspective of the shithead who wiped all that data.

Wikileaks had an image of a Bank of America VP laptop with email discussion about the creation and exploitation of predatory loans, and a complete indifference to the eventual 2008 crash that they knew it would cause.

As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power.

If you want a really good look at Assange's humanity around the time of all the DNC craziness, Laura Portrias was living with him at the time and filming him all day every day, and turned it into a movie called "Risk". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ Very similar vibe to Citizen Four, but with Assange instead of Snowden. Also for some reason it didn't get much attention because all sides hating on Assange became super trendy around that time.

For what it's worth, my political alignment is probabally far more liberal than the majority of people on this site, and I've been a Wikileaks supporter since they were just leaking internal fraternity documents.

> As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power.

Hillary's joke (if that is what it was) was an assault. She had the means to actually carry out the murder she suggested. Such actions, even in jest, have been known to cause people to get killed when some subordinate takes it as an order.

I think it takes a tremendous lack of empathy to not allow Assange a grudge against someone who quipped about murdering him and potentially the people around him, particularly someone with the awesome power of the united states behind them.

Journalists often have their axes to grind and their blind spots. It isn't great but it's just something we have to factor in... and I think this is one that a lot more justifiable than most.

And while he may have been used by Russia in the DNC leak, the leak revealed substantial unethical conduct that people were rightfully fired over. It brought transparency to the world that we deserved. If its publication depended on some bias on Assange's part, I think it wouldn't require much bias perhaps only would have been with respect to the timing of it.

To sum this post up with the reference only. Recommended documentary by Laura Poitras about Assange, called Risk [1].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/

> Wikileaks had an image of a Bank of America VP laptop with email discussion about the creation and exploitation of predatory loans, and a complete indifference to the eventual 2008 crash that they knew it would cause.

How do we know this is true if the data was burned?

> How do we know this is true if the data was burned?

Sadly we don't, and likely never will. Assange mentioned the laptop data and hinted at what it might contain in an interview. We do definitely know that a large cache of data got held hostage and eventually burned when fuckhead left. Like I mentioned before, there was a whole Benedict Cumberbartch movie made about the fallout there: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1837703/

Using the term 'Dumbshit' or 'fuckhead' doesn't give your argument credibility.

I'm not arguing anything, I'm recounting historical events. I don't need to beg for credibility, everything I'm saying is thoroughly documented on Wikipedia and various other sources. Daniel portrays himself as a hero in the book he wrote and in the movie he helped make, but he has been ostracized from the hacker community due to the atrocity of his actions.

Read his book, watch his movie. It's fascinating to see his perspective on how it all went down, but a lot of very bad people got away with some very bad things because of his actions, so forgive me for allowing a bit of contempt to seep through.

I wouldn't take either the word of one of the parties with obvious bias or a dramatization of events that was primarily sourced to the person with obvious bias at face value on a topic this controversial.

Proof or it didn't happen.

so you did not care about the content of the DNC campaign mails? And you are asserting an order of events that hasn't be established... is that what ran in your mind?

What was newsworthy in the campaign emails that justified dumping a guy’s whole inbox?

The illegal coordination between the Hillary campaign and the DNC was kind of a big deal, and did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC. I voted for Hillary in 2016, she was by far the better candidate, but I also seeded the fuck out of those Podesta emails because DNC corruption is absolutely inexcusable.

It wasn’t illegal, surprising, or even a particularly big deal that the DNC was leery of Sanders and had friends in the Clinton camp. If anything it’s remarkable that there was no there there. All those emails and there was barely anything that, even out of context, looked really bad.

In the public imagination the hacked emails got conflated with the “Clinton email server”. The point was just to muddy the water.

I wonder if the Russians dumped the whole inbox rather than selected messages because they couldn’t find any really bad ones.

> .. did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC

Sadly, it resulted in only a shuffle of players around the board. Wasserman-Schultz has plenty of congressional committee and leadership appointments. Donna Brazile was rewarded with Wasserman-Schultz's old gig at the helm of the DNC for leaking debate questions to Clinton

It wasn't illegal; DNC is a private org and sets its own rules. Name someone who went to jail over the content of the emails?

The emails do demonstrate that the party game is rigged (i.e. parties have favorites and tilt the scales in their favor). That's not only legal, it's intended---the point of parties is to coalesce political power.

The GOP demonstrates why the DNC is set up to tilt scales. GOP has fewer mechanisms to filter the popular vote in the party than the DNC does, and as a result, there was no backstop to Candidate Trump.

So all this talk about Democracy is just one big show...

Democratic elections are how we choose between the candidates sponsored by the parties. Hypothetically, there's nothing actually stopping those elections from choosing someone outside the party, but when we're talking in election over a population of 350 million people, even getting an individual's name in front of the voters such that they think to write them in requires a level of organization on par with a national party. Popular votes also inform, but do not single-handedly control, who the parties sponsor.

But the story of the parties themselves is a story of slowly widening democratic representation. The DNC system was even more tilted towards party insiders before the McGovern election. It's been pulling in popular vote over the decades, but it's not a mobocracy. I wouldn't be surprised if the RNC, after Trump, modifies its rules to add some kind of backstop against a television celebrity having so easy a path to the Presidency over career politicians.

Given the obvious election fraud caught on camera, forensic evidence, voter roll issues, intimidation of poll watchers, lack of transparency, & the lack actionable oversight that we saw in the 2020 election, is there any hope to reform the corrupt political system or even to ascertain "the consent of the governed"?

If you add a backstop against political outsiers gaining office, only insiders who are under control of entrenched politicrats (who have no interest in reform), corrupt actors & revolving door beurcracats/lobbyists can win a significant political position.

Thats a lot of words to say the whole system is rotten and any narrow window of reform is quickly shut...

As George Carlin said:

It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe

> is there any hope to reform the corrupt political system or even to ascertain "the consent of the governed"?

A shared interpretation of reality would be a good start. Most of the things you named in your first sentence happened at such low counts that they had functionally zero impact on the outcome of the election. For starters, there has been no instance of obvious election fraud caught on camera, no forensic evidence that has gone unchallenged, voter roll issues, while chronic, were being addressed for years leading up to the election, intimidation of poll watchers was in the eye of the beholder, and transparency was extraordinary (they had counts live-streamed). Actionable oversight also exists, but excludes "tossing the entire result of a state election," for obvious reasons (most of the actionable oversight is of the form "Screwing with elections is a federal crime and you do a lot of time for it").

There was a commission to look into instances of fraud in the 2016 election, and it concluded in 2018 that there were a handful of actionable events but the end result was the outcome was unchanged. The 2020 election's results were even wider than the difference in the 2016 outcome. It may not be unwise to appoint a commission to investigate the election results, but my money's personally on an outcome in 2022 similar to the outcome in 2018.

(... and Carlin was a great entertainer but not a political scientist).

Actually the Fraud caught on camera in Atlanta was shown to have swung the election, if you overlay the surge of Biden votes that occurred when the poll watchers were told to go home yet counting resumed. The problem is there is not institutional effort to investigate the irregularities. The problem with Election fraud is that plausible deniability & passing the buck is too easy to accomplish for any party not willing to prosecute the obvious crimes being committed.

The election fraud is obvious & you know it. Even if you think its not enough to swing the election, we still have a responsibility to investigate.

George Catlin does not need to be a political scientist to state what is obvious. People do not need to "stay in their lane" to participate in political discussions that ultimately affect them in one way or another

The events caught on camera were not fraud. They were an irregularity, but it appears they were already investigated and the relevant ballots were correctly counted. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/elections/fact...

Every time we criticize Georgia, we should remember that the President's party is the one in charge of elections there, and the one in charge of auditing and assuring security of those elections. There is every incentive for the state election commission to cry foul if there was foul to cry; the fact they have not is extremely telling, and one really has to widen the conspiracy net to come up with an explanation that puts the state election commission of Georgia in on a conspiracy to defraud the electoral process.

> there is not institutional effort to investigate the irregularities

I don't know what you would consider "institutional effort," but there are absolutely processes for investigating irregularities and multiple investigations are currently in progress. Georgia just concluded one such audit today. https://www.ajc.com/politics/no-fraud-georgia-audit-confirms... - they don't get reported on in detail because, to be honest, the details are boring and therefore don't make for very good news; they have about as much fun as a tax audit with even fewer exciting variables. and to really get a big picture of what's going on, one has to track the news from multiple states, since every state manages its own balloting system.

A full and exhaustive audit takes time. The President commissioned such an audit at the federal level for the 2016 election, and it resolved in 2018, finding an absolute handful of actionable cases. I would expect the audits that are going on now to continue, as multiple parties are interested in pursuing them. But they take time; the one for 2016 took two years.

You missed the part where Donna Brazile gave Presidential Debate questions to Hillary Clinton? Or the collusion between the DNC and NYT/WaPo to kneecap Sanders' campaign? The DNC strategy to promote Trump over the other GOP candidates?

Edit: Downvote if you must, but the question was what was newsworthy about the DNC Wikileaks release. Is it incorrect or that you don't like it?

the part that stands out to me is that the Clinton campaign and the media coordinated to elevate the candidacy of Trump, believing that he’d be easier to defeat in a general election

An email said they wanted to elevate Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson. At the time those seemed like the easiest people to beat. That’s the big scandal?

I guess that’s newsworthy in a very inside-baseball kind of way but I don’t think it justifies posting someone’s whole inbox online.

The big scandal is the knowledge that third way democrats have moved so far to the right, that they need fascist-lite candidates on the right to contrast themselves with, to the point that they gave material support to the farthest right wing components of the republican party.

The major message for two presidential campaigns has been "we must do everything possible to defeat Trump, and by that we mean not voting for progressives" is BS when the third wayers had a major hand in putting him in the White House to begin with, and their long term strategy more or less requires similar tactics in the future.

> into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory

The Epstein incident where they used the code word "pizza" for sex turned out to be real. Imaginations running wild turned that into a false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop. Is it fair to criticize wikileaks for unrelated parties imaginations running wild?

Pizza was never a codeword for sex---Epstein was wholly disjoint from the data Wikileaks divulged and was brought down by a long-running FBI investigation.

Maybe they were referring to Prince Andrew's alibi of being at a Pizza Express in Woking, UK? Which has nothing to do with "Pizzagate".

"false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop" is Pizzagate.

A different pizza shop in a different country, but sure.

That they've over promised sounds like pretty weak reason to claim people that support them are either lunatics or right wing.

Political campaign staff and people with ties to secret services seem like the exact sorts journalists should be meeting with. If they're one and the same even better.

> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone.

Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Manning on US war crimes in Iraq.

But if the lives of poor brown people far away are not as important as cheap partizanship then the CIA can make you believe anything.

Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. I presume you're OK with torture too as long as you think it serves your club?

> Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture.

The claim of Clinton calling for Assange's assassination seems to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor.

Your "torture" claim is plainly false (even if it were true, what's the point in appealing to the authority of UN?), the "characterization" is by Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture (so he's just something like an independent consultant).

More importantly, basically everything Melzer said about Assange is bullshit. I read the interview of Melzer that seems to be the source for all of the absurd claims; and all of Melzer's claims there are vague, unsubstantiated, unverifiable or nonfalsifiable; except for one:

Turns out that Melzer's only concrete accusation is based on a misreading of evidence at best; the one against the Swedish police, of how they supposedly tampered with (even fabricated) one of the testimonies. The evidence for that is inconclusive, Melzer was possibly confused with the format of the Freedom of Information documents released by the police, but in any case Melzer is making a big fuss out of nothing and downplaying rape with his other comments at the same time.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868

Also see the comment by one of Assange's alleged victims:

> One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a "proper rape-victim" would have to act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially "untrue and defamatory"

I think it should be pretty clear that Melzer's word is worth very little.

The only dupes at this point are the useful idiots who still support WikiLeaks. It has long since passed from being anything useful into being an cult of personality built around Assange.

I'd call it halfway between cult of personality and idealistic belief that maximizing free flow of information maximizes beneficial outcomes without attention to measuring whether that assumption is true.

It turns out some secrets are harmful, and some are helpful to the stable function of a society. Practically speaking, I believe it is hard to make a case that Wikileaks has been a net positive, unless one can see a president Trump as part of a net positive story. On the flip side, history is also dotted with obvious examples of secret keeping resulting in long-term damage.

The truth, I think, is that the beneficial nature of secrets is something you can only evaluate situationally.

The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so.

I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

> The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps.

WikiLeaks tried to get the Pentagon to help them redact documents[1]. They refused to do so knowing there would be people like you accusing WikiLeaks/Manning of wrongdoing here.

> I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'?

The reason, oftentimes, is simply to hide wrongdoing, as was the case here. The fact Manning was imprisoned, (and tortured), while the killers of civilians and journalists she exposed were not shows that this is not a just system. It's designed to chill whileblowers and allow atrocities to continue, unpunished.

How anyone could support that is beyond me.

1 - https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/

The military leaks did shed light on (possible; there is dispute in the international community) war crimes, and had Manning only leaked those specific videos, my opinion would be very different.

The State Department cable leaks were grossly irresponsible, as were most of the rest of the military intel leaks. She slurped and dumped without understanding of the ramifications of divulging all that information, which can endanger her fellow soldiers in the field, who had not committed war crimes. That she appears to have gotten lucky and it did not, in fact, endanger soldiers in the field is irrelevant to the reason such a slurp-and-dump is a court-martial offense.

I think reasonable people can disagree on whether, in aggregate, she did more harm than good. She shed light on (what we would want to be) senseless deaths of several civilians in a military theater, and separate from that, she catalyzed multiple revolutions resulting in the deaths of hundreds.

>You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'?

What warcrimes? Please be specific. Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime, and was selectively edited by Wikileaks to try to make it look worse. All of which made Wikileak's claims far more dubious.

> Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime

Since when is killing journalists not a warcrime?

Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary of how one arrives at that conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri... --- the short form is that the laws around war crimes give broad leeway to soldiers in the field interpreting a situation on the ground, and from the point of view of the gunship, they may have believed they were firing on attackers attempting to reach RPGs in the vehicle. This is one of the tragedies of modern insurgency warfare... Since nobody's in uniform, how can one be sure that the person in civilian clothing crawling through the operation is trying to escape or going for a concealed weapon?

I'm personally inclined to agree with Mark Taylor that "...what this video shows is really a case that challenges whether the laws of war are strict enough."

Within the US, there is a similar broad cultural argument ongoing on whether laws protecting police officers err too far on the side of assuming the cops' in-the-field interpretation of what happened should guide how the law understands what happened.

The Apache gunner did not know that they were firing on a journalist, they had believed they were engaging a legal target and were doing so within given rules of engagement. Which is legal. It's a tragedy that they were mis-identified, but again, not a warcrime. Had they known they were non combatants and fired on them still, that would have been a warcrime.

I don't think people who support WikiLeaks are lunatics but it is clear now that Assange is obviously not merely a journalist.

He's more journalist than most. Reprinting Twitter spats and press releases does not make you a journalist. Publishing newsworthy information in the public interest does.

If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better?

I find it incredible that you think that the answer to this could be "no".

Would you honestly rather read from an "unbiased" journalist who diligently repeats what both sides said on Twitter than a biased one that actually uncovered important new facts?

Especially when that "unbiased" "journalist" probably is just as biased as Assange, anyway, and their only real purpose is to construct a filter bubble for you.

> does that make you any better

Yes. Because at least you are publishing new information. And then then people can decide for themselves how to interpret it.

> If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better?

Same could be said about the New York Time, the Washington Post, Fox, & NPR. All media outlets are biased. Some are more honest about it than others.

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