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Comment by magoon | Hacker News Reader

> I also find the idea that you can prosecute someone with espionage (most likely) for what is essentially journalism very disturbing.

Is it journalism? I never saw a story when I read the leaks; it seems that their purpose has been to disclose private (stolen) conversations that are obviously state secrets.

Update: I'm backing away from this; my only intention was to ask whether it would make anybody a "journalist" to simply release the verbatim private conversations of others. I have no intention of debating the right or wrong of Wikileaks or what they've done.

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There is no copyright on government documents. Once you know something it is no longer a secret by definition and you are free to discuss and report on it. It seems with Wikileaks that this is no longer the case, making this a stunning attack on freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

If you want to get uptight about the security implications of the leaks, a better place to start is wondering who setup the system that allegedly allowed a mentally unbalanced soldier to carry evidence of war crimes and private diplomatic correspondence out of a military facility on a USB key. Assuming it was Manning who leaked the information AND it constituted any real security threat, it seems clear he should never have had access to that sort of material.

Now I'm uptight?

I raise a valid point -- journalists don't capture and disseminate private conversations, they report. I have never seen a journalistic article from Wikileaks, much as I have never seen a journalist simply distribute a bunch of private conversations with no story.

> journalists don't capture and disseminate private conversations

Perhaps you have heard of the terms "public service" and "public sector"? Government documents are not private conversations and I am genuinely appalled you believe yourself entitled to speak on only those matters your government deems fit for public discourse.

> Government documents are not private conversations.

huh? if they weren't private, then why were they newsworthy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

Seems like a meaningless difference to me. You're saying that if Wikileaks had carefully summarized each document instead of releasing the actual documents then it would be journalism?

Wikileaks presented information, just because that information wasn't in a form that you are comfortable and familiar with doesn't make it not journalism.

No one had ever seen a journalist who published exclusively online until a few years ago and many people claimed that wasn't "journalism". Now bloggers are pretty well-recognized.

The volume of information is so large today that a new form of journalism is required. Wikileaks has provided that, or at least led the charge to provide it.

Wikileaks acted as a clearinghouse for raw information. Then others read it, interpreted it and wrote about it. I don't see the problem.

> You're saying that if Wikileaks had carefully summarized each document instead of releasing the actual documents then it would be journalism?

Um...yeah

But what's the difference? We're big kids, we can read the documents for ourselves. Or we can wait and let another news outlet read them and interpret them for us. I just don't see this as being a meaningful difference.

Sorry, you're wrong. Getting information to the public is journalism. It's usually better to go beyond raw information to do so, but making the information itself more accessible than it was before (because it was secret, for instance) is very valuable. I spent a couple of years doing that in a newsroom.

And he is one more than 4 million who have such access, by the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet

I would say yes.

Journalism is supposed to guide you to readily available and verifiable facts whenever possible. The journalist gives you insight into an event. One is then able to leapfrog the initial hurdle of that initial research and more easily educate yourself about the world you live in.

Without facts and sources, it's just storytime.

EDIT: More importantly, you can't divorce journalistic research from journalism itself.

I disagree that "facts" are "journalism" -- but can you even say that the text of a bunch of emails, dumped verbatim, are readily and verifiable facts? Or is it simply somebody else's conversation?

Is whatever you say in email a readily available and verifiable fact? is dumping your private emails "journalism"?

The "fact" is that "somebody said this in an email". Some of the most interesting things in the diplomatic cables were not of the form "X did Y" but rather "X said Y to Z". In that case, yes, an email is a fact.

Well in the era of Watergate it wasn't like dumping the information onto bit-torrent was a viable option for the investigative journalists. They had to write it up in article form just to communicate their findings.

Interesting point, however I am having a hard time coming up with another journalist in this era who reports their findings by dumping information onto bit-torrent.

So what? Seriously, why does it matter even one iota if there are others doing the same thing? Your entire objection to Wikileaks seems to be that it is unconventional in a literal sense, it doesn't follow the conventions of journalism that you are comfortable with. But that's just how new things work, they're different because they're new and innovative.

Unless you have a better reason than "it's different and weird", your objections are just like those of a grumpy old man complaining about the music the youngsters listen to these days.

> Your entire objection to Wikileaks seems to be that it is unconventional in a literal sense

I'm not objecting to Wikileaks, I'm objecting to Assange calling it journalism.

I've gotten downvoted simply because people are emotional over this -- as if I'm attacking them.

I was glad you raised the question, as I had the same thought as you at first. That just cutting and pasting some documents is not journalism.

I then read a tonne of definitions of the word "journalism" and to me. They pretty much all just say journalism is getting the facts out there, in any form. There's no requirement for a journalist to make a "report", for it to be journalism.

I would be interested to see more examples of journalism where no report was written.

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