WikiLeaks Releases Fifth Estate Challenger: Mediastan | Hacker News Reader

WikiLeaks Releases Fifth Estate Challenger: Mediastan

wikileaks.org

157 pointsr0h1n44 comments

Give me something I can print off and a way to attach it to a movie poster without damaging the theatre owner's display case and I'll visit my local theatres and make sure the URL and QR code to "Mediastan" is visible to all patron who go to see "The Fifth Estate"

http://b.vimeocdn.com/us/vod_poster/781/7816_275.jpg -- but I cannot find a large sized one. Try asking @wikileaks (https://twitter.com/wikileaks)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/175613597/Wl-Media

That's kind of the idea, but I'm thinking something that send the message about 5th Estate being fiction as well, so watch this movie after you see this one.

Sorry, IANA designer or a copy writer.

Assange should do a Reddit AMA promoting this movie, seeing as Cumberbatch just got done promoting The Fifth Estate yesterday on Reddit. The Cumberbatch AMA was very disappointing, because all upvoted questions were just fawning compliments from Cumberbatch fans.

For what it's worth, he did address a question regarding his portrayal of Mr Assange with more than a few words: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1o8l5f/i_am_benedict_c...

Given that he's pretty anti-Manning (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/14/benedict-cumberb...) I strongly doubt that's a genuine response. Most likely it was written by a PR manager.

A Redditor made a very discerning comment about possible motives behind the movie here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1o8l5f/i_am_benedict_c...

Feel free to scroll all the way down on that Guardian interview, below which is the response of Cumberbatch to the way he feels his opinion about Manning was misrepresented in the article.

How is that anti-Manning?

The greatness in what Manning did is that she knew that she was breaking a law and she knew that there was no way she'd be able to avoid punishment and she did so anyway. To say "she broke a law" and "I don't see why Obama should grant a pardon" is not anti-Manning in any way. If anything, it recognizes that she knew what the consequences are when deciding on her actions.

Also, quoting from the first comment by GuardianMod:

> In a note sent to the Guardian after publication of this story, Benedict Cumberbatch said:

> > "I feel my views have been misrepresented. Do I think Manning should be pardoned? Yes. Do I think that's likely to happen? Sadly no. Re Snowdon I said in the interview that the use of threats to life as a reason to erode civil liberties through intrusive government surveillance can also be as dangerous to democracy as the terrorism such actions claim to be preventing. This wasn't printed for some reason."

So I think we're either positing a massive conspiracy where Benedict Cumberbatch appears to be very pro-Manning/Snowden/Assange but isn't, and employs a PR manager (with a distinctive writing style) to keep up that appearance for some reason, or the state of the world in which he actually is.

> The greatness in what Manning did is that she knew that she was breaking a law and she knew that there was no way she'd be able to avoid punishment and she did so anyway.

Manning never intended to get caught. She was not outed on her own will, Adrian Lamo outed her.

> So I think we're either positing a massive conspiracy where Benedict Cumberbatch appears to be very pro-Manning/Snowden/Assange but isn't, and employs a PR manager (with a distinctive writing style) to keep up that appearance for some reason, or the state of the world in which he actually is.

You're suggesting this as if it's only a distant, far-fetched possibility. It isn't -- it is routinely what PR managers do. This is basic stuff. Hell, I've done PR stuff more remarkable than this at my dayjob.

I'm pretty certain that the note sent to the Guardian was for PR reasons too. Generally speaking readers of the Guardian are pro-Wikileaks, it would make sense for Cumberbatch people to send that note to that crowd at this time.

This sort of assumes Manning knew he would get caught, which might have been something he feared but nevertheless hoped to avoid. Another possibility is that he took action with the desire to get kicked out of the military role he was trapped in.

BTW I'm using the male pronoun because all this took place prior to Manning's announcement of changing gender identity. I don't see any logic in extending the new identity backwards in time to before it was adopted, an approach which has made Manning's Wikipedia page much harder to read.

The logic is that of choosing to respect her identity rather than going out of your way to disrespect it.

>I don't see any logic in extending the new identity backwards in time to before it was adopted

Do you refer to gay people as straight when talking about the time before they came out?

"He and his then wife..." - sure, why not?

It feels weird to me, too. The military way, when someone is promoted is to say " <current> ( then <former> )". Not sure if that is better than just saying she, unless there is a specific reason he former male identity is relevant. Is I. A given statement.

I don't want to imply anything with this comment but the number of accounts with the same or similar age as Cumberbatch participating in that thread is highly unusual.

You forgot to mention the important fact that he's a new account. Seems perfectly plausible that people saw the AMA, and it spurred some lurkers to sign up a new account so they could ask a question.

A lot of the accounts that were replying were not simply new, they were 3 days old -- incidentally also the age of the account with which Cumberbatch was participating in the AMA.

Given the size of Reddit, I wonder what the probability distribution of new accounts would be be on an article.

How do you figure that? Manually checking the ages of accounts proved laborious and unrewarding.

With RES you can simply hover over the usernames of comments to check without loading a new page.

This is a movie about freedom of speech, self-censorship in media, and which people are really put at risk by publishing cables (hint: corruption and organized crime).

Short summary, including spoilers:

A group of Wikileaks-affiliated journalists tries to find media partners in the -stan countries that would publish Wikileaks cables locally. The meetings with those organizations are set up as interviews about free speech in their respective countries. As a surprise in those meetings, they are offered the cables about their own country. They film the initial reactions, try to sign a gentlemen's agreement about how the cables should be handled, and follow up if any stories were published. It's really interesting to see what happens. Some sign the agreement, but don't publish anything. One guy in Kazakhstan actually says that he doesn't want democracy. The editor of a newspaper in Turkmenistan that they speak to turns out to be a member of parliament. That newspaper has a picture of Turkmenistan's president on it's front page every day.

Then, Alan Rusbridger from The Guardian and Bill Keller from the NYT are interviewed. It's astonishing to see that media in the US and UK have similar fears than those in the -stan countries. For example, Assange criticized that The Guardian redacted the names of a mafia boss, who according to cables had close ties with Uzbekistan's president. They apparently did this because they fear libel lawsuits, in which the burden of proof would lie on the libeler.

It's free this weekend for people in the UK, everyone else can rent it online for just one pound (about $1.50) from Journeyman Pictures.

If you prefer to do things differently, a magnet link is available here: http://pastebin.com/6RVSpTAa

This is currently being shared on The Pirate Bay[1], for those of us not living in the UK, and too poor to pay for a viewing/DRM.

[1] http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/9039415/Mediastan

You can also just buy the movie from anywhere in the world, DRM-free, from vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/mediastan

I saw this last week with a really fascinating Q&A from Assange, thought he was very compelling. I'm not sure how the people of Sixteen Films will feel about this "challenging" The Fifth Estate though.

It was a worthwhile doc as well, worth the watch - much better than the Alex Gibney thing earlier this year, which felt very much phoned in.

This is nothing like Fifth Estate, but it does look really interesting in its own right. Not a drama so much as the diary of a road trip through central asia with wikileaks workers along for the ride, interjecting with their own stories and negotiating with journalists about the cable releases.

I've skipped through a few interviews, and it's enlightening (for me at least) as an overview of the region's politics and the attitude of journalists to publishing these cables. I'll be going back to watch it all.

[EDIT] The section on Afghanistan starting at 0:45 or so is particularly interesting.

You or someone you know probably suffers from a monoculture, statist-based education. Dig through some pre-20th century civil thought and you will come across: "Adversarial Systems" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system

There you will find a natural remedy dating back thousands of years that holds that subservience and conformity are poor forms of governance.

Why doesn't he just release this as a video file?

Written by michealochurch?

A clever pun/reference to michaelochurch's use of VC-istan here. :)

I rather doubt it, given that multiple countries in Central Asia have names ending in -stan (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan...). It just menas '-land' in Urdu as far as I recall.

Pedantistan

watch it free this weekend if you are from UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gbenFTcisY

Currently at 2426 views.

Only 910,883,012 more views to snatch the number two spot in the 'most watched on YouTube' charts from Justin Bieber. Should be a snip...

One of these things is not like the other.

Free for all, enjoy while it last:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK6DDC4CV0s

This was one of those rare cases where I was ready to pay for the video; but then I am confronted with "Sorry, this film is not available in your region." and the buy or rent buttons are disabled. But guess what, somebody has uploaded it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK6DDC4CV0s

Why is an organization hell-bent on free information trying to censor a movie because they don't like it? Isn't that entirely contradictory to their mission?

In what way are they trying to censor The Fifth Estate?

They say it isn't the truth. They aren't trying to censor it, they're trying to get the truth out. How is that censorship?

You say that like it's a bad thing?

Lol, they have it free only if you have a UK ip. Wrong audience to do that to.

Assange is sure helping with this movie's publicity.

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