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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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