If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame | Hacker News Reader

If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

gigaom.com

94 pointsnextparadigms34 comments

"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection"

No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up.

This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange doesn't like. No thank you. Wikileaks should not get to choose what to leak. Either leak everything you are given (after redaction of course), or nothing, do not selectively choose who to leak against.

Once you do that you become a political organization.

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection.

We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like.

What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileaks should have redacted <whatever> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced by our government as soon as it suited them.

> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced

I think it's for two reasons - a: They are not that silent - they released everything they had and the US couldn't do anything. So there isn't all that much to be outraged about.

And b: I don't think that most people actually support them (their goals) anymore. I certainly don't. I did, but not anymore.

Personally I think their leaks harmed things, and helped nothing. Especially the ones about Abbas. If people had actually believe the leaks were real and not US propaganda (yes I know how funny that sounds to you) those leaks could have easily started another Palestinian civil war (well a Fata vs Hamas war anyway).

You may argue that the leaks actually did help, but that's not the perception I have. Maybe I'm manipulated by the media, could be. But it doesn't matter - if I am, then so are lots more. And that's why people are not more outraged.

_Personally I think their leaks harmed things, and helped nothing._

I agree. At least, I think that's probably true - I haven't extensively researched it.

And yet, I nevertheless support wikileaks. News organizations aren't tasked with "helping things", they're tasked with "publishing things". And in the age of the social media pandemic, they're tasked with discovering and publishing things that couldn't be discovered and published by the masses - and a very large part (if not most) of that are things that governments do not want known.

Obviously, journalistic organizations have the responsibility not to publish things that will clearly lead to harm - for instance, military plans in a hostile country, missile launch codes, or names and addresses of anonymous dissenters in /any/ country. Past that, I only ask for the dissemination information.

Perhaps it is because the very concept of wikileaks is flawed from the start no matter your political persuasion. If it is successful, information will be out there. Powerful entities (including, but not limited to the US Government) can do one of at least things to counter that.

1) Drive actual secrets further underground and out of reach of wikileaks.

2) Use the leaks to spread disinformation/propaganda to their advantage.

3) Use violence, lies, and intimidation to help "shape" the form of the leaks.

It was doomed from the start. It was either a politically motivated propaganda machine, in which case it's fair game; or it was a lofty, academic pursuit, in which case it was a game.

> "WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity"

WL and its supporters like to call it an "intelligence agency" (Assange himself has said this). That's more than just a "journalistic entity".

Why is anyone surprised when various governments treat WL like an intelligence agency?

I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't).

Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the embassy cable leak (http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html). Of course, they haven't done anything interesting since then, either. Look at their own charts, and you see that their income is heavily correlated with major releases (etc. Collateral Murder in April, Embassy cables in December) and their current donations don't look that far removed from, say, September or May 2010.

Even their own financial statements (http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-Projekt04_de...) say that most of their money came wire transfer (which is still possible and fully legal). This is definitely more an issue of people not wanting to donate than it is being not able to. Obviously, the best way to raise more funds would be to do more high-profile work; WikiLeaks is choosing to shut down all their high profile work.

You say the government shut them down, but in fact they shut themselves down, as your parent comment mentions. They shut down their super-useful, award-winning site (eventually to be put back up as a read-only archive at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks) and re-purposed themselves entirely to hyping up the five things they got from Brad Manning. Now, they're out of money, they're out of juicy Brad Manning leaks, they haven't even been accepting anything new since they shut themselves down, and so they're gonna drum up their little government-conspiracy thing that they do very, very well, to try to raise some more money.

So your argument is that the arrest and ongoing prosecution of Assange(sp?), the shutdown of services from paypal++, visa, master card, bank of america, Western Union and Amazon had pretty much no noticeable effect on donations, was not the result of a coordinated effort by the US government and the real reason donations are down is because they haven't released any more leaks?

sounds entirely plausible to me. would you like to buy a bridge?

++Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account.

You're obviously exaggerating what I said for effect, but that's the gist of it, yeah.

I didn't mention his sex crime accusations, and I only said that there's no actual evidence that the US government directly influenced Visa and Mastercard. Surely it's possible Visa, MasterCard, etc. made their decisions on their own, but I honestly don't know, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a "favor."

But for the rest, the numbers speak for themselves, and it's pretty much common sense. Everytime there's major leak, they got a ton of money. They've haven't been publishing, they're not getting attention, nobody's donating to them. From their own charts, they made more in post-blockade February '11 than they did in pre-blockade Sep '10. Again, most of their 2010 money... more than 50% of all their money came through channels that are still totally available.

It is true that they were taking in more with PayPal than through transfers before December. There's obviously no way to know how much of potential paypal donations were lost versus replaced by wire donations, but it remains that most of their money in 2010 came from transfers. In December, about 2/3s of it came from transfers. The steep drop-off from December to January in their charts has nothing to do with the blockade, right? They got 398,365.60EUR through wire transfer in December and (estimating from their charts) about 20K in January. Is that not clearly just interest from the embassy cables dying down?

They're claiming they've lost out on "tens of millions of pounds" because of this 'blockade.' That is a ridiculous number, considering they made just more than 1M last year. Somehow they expected to average more than twice that every month? Despite not publishing any new sources of material? Or even accepting any new material? Ridiculous.

This is an organization that accepted credit card payments for 46 DAYS and they're coming on like Visa and Mastercard are ruining them?

Everything Wikileaks has done since Assange started talking with Brad Manning has been hyped-up, conspiracy-theory, drama-queen publicity stunt and this 'financial blockade' is no exception.

Tell me more about this bridge you have, though.

heh. Thats a good response, thanks.

I do wonder whether transfers work if your bank account has been frozen?

They are drama queen-ish though, I agree. Luckily that doesn't stop them from being a journalistic entity.

As they mention on their Banking Blockade site, the Treasury found no reason to put them on their blacklist, and nobody has frozen their bank accounts.

I agree they're a 'journalistic entity' -- whatever that means. I was only rebuffing when you said "We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like."

Their webpage is still up. Assange is still making cheesy videos where he tells you how terrible the world is. It's still legal for you to donate. Nobody has accused them of committing any crime. A handful of US companies decided not to do business with them, but with only circumstantial evidence of government influence. There were certainly no judges involved.

Wikileaks shut themselves down to new submissions a year and a half ago when they started pushing Brad Manning leaks, and they've done nothing but hype up and politicize those leaks since. Now they're whining that nobody's donating to a whistleblower site that doesn't accept whistleblowing. They shut themselves down.

In no way did the US government unilaterally decide to shut anyone down. They're still allowed to operate, and just drama-queening that they're shut down. If the government were to try to shut down a news organization just because it didn't agree with them, there definitely would be a gigantic backlash.

Journalists @ the Guardian released the underacted cables.

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/31/wikileaks-guardian-journali...

> It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

If the NYT meets the standards of "journalism", Wikileaks sure as hell does. Better to accidentally release unredacted information than the government sanitized press releases of the NYT.

> It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

Is this not a big part of the campaign to discredit Wikileaks? Focus on the person to hide the idea. Ideas have to be reckoned with; people can be written off ad hominem.

I'm not trying to say Wikileaks is even near perfect. The main point is that the NYT, which many see as authoritative, consistently avoids mentioning the implications of what is happening to Wikileaks.

When people say the New York Times does "journalism", one of the unspoken connotations of that is that they are paying actual highly-qualified people to travel across the world, often into war zones and scenes of chaos and disaster, to record and report events firsthand.

It is awfully hard to even formulate an argument that the New York Times isn't a journalistic organization.

On the other hand, it is not as difficult to formulate an argument that Wikileaks staff aren't journalists. You are very unlikely to agree with those arguments, and I respect that. I have a lot of friends who ardently support Wikileaks and think no less of them for it.

But I have a problem with putting Wikileaks on the exact same level as The New York Times. They simply aren't on the same level.

They don't have to be on the same level -- they both simply have to be engaged in the practice of journalism. And is the fact that they send people around the globe what makes them a journalistic entity? No. It's that they publish information that is important in some way, which is exactly what WikiLeaks does -- which makes them deserving of the same protection as the New York Times.

The bulk of what the Times does is not what you're describing here. For the most part, it just reprints what it hears from sources — just like WikiLeaks does — and the rest is even less newsy content like columns. By your definition, it seems like only a few pages of the Times are a journalistic organization and the rest is…well, whatever WikiLeaks is.

Certainly. It's really laughable that people put Wikileaks at the same level as the NYT. Really. You might recall not too long ago, a Wikileak cofounder took off and decided to destroy all the data he had beyond recovery. What happened after that then? Nothing. Imagine if a NYT editor did something of similar magnitude.

> It is awfully hard to even formulate an argument that the New York Times isn't a journalistic organization.

I'll yield - doing so would set the bar so high that there would be no 'journalistic organizations'. To be useful, 'journalism' has to be inclusive, avoiding ruling out every organization based on its failings.

> On the other hand, it is not as difficult to formulate an argument that Wikileaks staff aren't journalists

Precisely because Wikileaks is so different from other journalistic organizations. It's very easy to choose from any number of simple criteria that separate Wikileaks from 'the rest', and then assert that this criterion is a requirement of journalists. But since we're classifying organizations based on what they do, rather than what they don't, it's awfully hard to exclude one which solicits information, analyzes facts, and publishes stories.

More connotations of journalism are speaking truth to power and critical analysis of the situation. Wikileaks does a much better job of the former, and the NYT has abdicated the latter.

Who made Wikileaks about Assange himself? Certainly not Wikileaks?

Really?

Assange did literally ransom the full wikileaks document dump (including the secret cables) for his personal well-being legal immunity.

If the goal was to create a distributed organization w/o obvious single points of failure, Assange certainly did nothing to guarantee those ends.

Reading this article several times, I really failed to see a clear logic from the author as to why the supposed dying of Wikileaks is the NYT's fault.

I think the theory is that WL was a competing news organization with the potential to replace NYT, but NYT hasn't rolled over and died, therefore blocking WL from taking its seat on the throne.

Agreed - it seems like more of a failed attempt at a namedrop, when more of the "blame" should be directed towards the public. If Times readers as a whole lose express interest in WikiLeaks while Assange is dealing with legal issues and many other whistleblowing sites (OpenLeaks.org as an example) haven't seem to been releasing any high-profile documents, isn't that just more the reason for the Times to focus efforts elsewhere?

As the author of the post, maybe I can try and clear that up: my point was that while we have all failed to some extent -- by not supporting WikiLeaks and protesting things like the PayPal blockade and Amazon deletion and the government's dubious case -- the New York Times has failed by not using its national media platform to protest those things and their impact on free speech and freedom of the press. And my argument about why they didn't do that is in part that the NYT sees WikiLeaks as competition. Hope that helps.

What about the people among us who don't think that Wikileaks is a good thing to support?

What if there are more people who think that than message board sentiment analysis would lead you to believe?

What if the New York Times simply doesn't agree with your take --- ok, the popular take on places like HN --- about Wikileaks?

The article was my opinion -- obviously you are entitled to your own :-)

Does it matter if anyone thinks WikiLeaks is a "good" thing?

These are the questions that matter: Is WikiLeaks a journalistic entity? Why or why not? Is it OK for a bank/financial entity to block donations to any entity, journalism or not? *If money is speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo) how is blocking donations not a criminal offence?

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

Because Visa and Mastercard are private companies that can decide whom they want or don't want as customers. They'll deny you from being a merchant if you have poor credit, too. They take on risk with every new merchant they accept, and I can see how WikiLeaks might pose a greater risk than most. If a group's supporters are willing to DoS visa.com and mastercard.com, I wouldn't put it past them to make large donations with stolen credit card numbers either, and Visa and Mastercard are on the hook for the chargebacks.

And, of course, since money is speech, it's fully within your rights to donate to wikileaks (cash, check, wire transfer, money order), just as its within Visa's rights not to accept Wikileaks as a customer.

EDIT: And just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that there are no political motivations behind the decisions of Visa and Mastercard. I'm just answering the question about why this isn't for some reason illegal.

[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than simply downvote?]

In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom.

It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs and desire to please those with political power.

Think about when the last time the NY Times published any remotely controversial investigative journalism... oh yeah it was the articles that supported the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Strangely, the Times (a good but ardently neoconservative) paper still manages to fool progressives into thinking that it offers a sympathetic voice. Sadly the pressures of competing in the online world have left the paper with no choice but to sell off its journalistic integrity year after year.

If anything, one would hope that a paper like the Times would have taken a skeptical but journalistically sharp look at the leaked info and would have held off on the ad hominem attack on the Wikileaks founder, at least until some evidence was offered in support of the allegations against him.

And no, I don't think the total buffoonery written by Krugman, Dowd, and Herbert counts for any progressiveness points. If anything the three are a sideshow act with no relevance to the issues that matter.

You're downvoted for pretending controversial opinions (that the nytimes is a neoconservative stronghold) are obvious and need no justification.

The truth even if it causes some harm, is always infinitely better than a lie, even if it helps someone. That is my position.

There will be many causes for Wikileaks' death (if in fact it does in fact die). None more damaging though than the damage Wikileaks did to itself. Leaving unredacted the names of informants who were later executed for providing the very information Wikileaks posted clinched its fate IMO.

[citation needed]

I haven't read any information regarding sources being executed.

I stand corrected. There's no proof any source has been killed, but the Taliban has repeatedly vowed to hunt down and "punish" the sources not redacted in the Wikileaks docs. Many links on that on the Web.

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