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Comment by some_random | Hacker News Reader

Wow. In an age of increasing scrutiny of journalists, particularly in regards to the leaking of classified documents, this is a really bad look. Journalists screwing over their sources is unacceptable in every case, we don't have any trouble understanding that when it comes to interviewing terrorists, I don't know why it's a question when it comes to this.

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Some stories are bigger than sources. The 'victim', Ellsberg, would seem to agree.

As far as I remember, Ellsberg was a true believer for a long time and originally wanted the information (not all of the papers) out so America would double down on VN. He thought it was still winnable. He moderated at some point in the process. Sheehan wasn't going to wait for his navel gazing and made him a progressive hero.

This is the problem I have about people who leak documents. They have an agenda and so only release the parts favorable to their bias rather than the whole archive. What was held back from the story that there were documents that showed that the US government was actively trying to get out of the war via back channel negotiations.

If Humphrey had been president, I could find fault in Ellsberg's decision not to release the diplomatic volumes. Knowing that Nixon held his own back channel negotiations to prevent peace and help his election chances, showing that Johnson made limited secret peace talks wasn't very relevant. Ellsberg's view that he didn't want to give Nixon an excuse to stall peace was a good call.

Oh, we were actively trying to not drop napalm in Vietnam? If only we could have been a little faster in not dropping napalm. Dratz!

So if someone leaked info about a killbot program, your protest wouldn't be that it's bad, but it's likely there's other work going on that'll hopefully make such killbots irrelevant, and why weren't those documents leaked? That doesn't sound very reassuring at all.

>Some stories are bigger than sources.

Absolutely. However, is it bigger than every story you're ever going to run? Because if I'm a potential source, and I see that you're rag is fine with sending sources to jail for a source, I'm not going to talk to you. Worse, if I'm a guerrilla group with an embedded journalist, I may very logically decide that they are a threat.

> The 'victim', Ellsberg, would seem to agree.

I don't recall the documentary I watched, but the impression I got was that Ellsberg needed or wanted Sheehan to make the call that he couldn't bring himself to make.

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