|
|
July 26, 2010
The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization"In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new."Wikileaks.org: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 From my internal notebook and Twitter feed, a few notes on this development: 1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it. “It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.” 2. The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:
3. If you don’t know much about Wikileaks or why it exists, the best way to catch up is this New Yorker profile of Julien Assange. He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries. And for even more depth, listen to this: NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter formerly at the New York Times, about Wikileaks and what it does. (35 min with Q & A.) 4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!” Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks. 5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com: The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian. Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show. 6. From an editor’s note: “At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.” There’s the new balance of power, right there. In the revised picture we find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors. 7. If you’re a whistle blower with explosive documents, to whom would you rather give them? A newspaper with a terrestrial address organized under the laws of a nation that could try to force the reporter you contacted to reveal your name, and that may or may not run the documents you’ve delivered to them online…. or Wikileaks, which has no address, answers no subpoenas and promises to run the full cache if they can be verified as real? (And they’re expert in encryption, too.) Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t even be in contention? 8. I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget. Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes. The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work? I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem. But the comment bar is open, so help me out. 9. Few people realize how important leaking has been to the rise of the political press since the mid-18th century. Leaks were actually “present at the creation” of political reporting. I’m moving quickly this morning, so I only have time for a capsule version. Those with a richer knowledge of the British Parliament’s history can confirm or correct this outline. Once upon a time, Parliament’s debates were off limits to newspapers. But eventually, through a long period of contestation, the right to report on what was said in Parliament was securely won (though not constitutionally guaranteed.) John Wilkes is the pivotal figure and 1770 the date when the practice became institutionalized. A factor in that struggle was the practice of leaking. The way it worked then is essentially the same as it works today. There’s a bitter dispute in Parliament and people line up on one side or the other. Unable or unwilling to accept defeat, the losing faction decides to widen the battlefield by leaking confidential information, thus bringing the force of public opinion into play. It’s a risky maneuver, of course, but the calculation is that fighting it out in public may alter the balance of forces and lead to a re-decision. Each time the cycle is repeated, the press becomes a bigger factor in politics. And internal struggles for power remain to this day a major trigger for leaks. Conscience, of course, is a different trigger. Whistleblowers can be of either type: calculating advantage-seekers, or men and women with a troubled conscience. We don’t know which type provided the logs to Wikileaks. What we do know is that a centuries-old dynamic is now empowering new media, just as it once empowered the ink-on-paper press.
Posted by Jay Rosen at July 26, 2010 1:31 AM
Comments
we enter an era now where we begin to be conscious of "collective consciousness" and its role as "prime mover" of the "world" and its events ... analysis of the various parts and components proceeds only fitfully, because we do not yet have a language of whole ... the problem? adjusting to a pre-existing global reality larger than the individual thinking mind can grasp ... consciousness itself, however, has no problem with any of this ... it is our limited self-concept that does ... solution? easy. identify with the whole... inescapable and unavoidable, by the way ... not if, but when Posted by: gregorylent at July 26, 2010 2:56 AM | Permalink Thanks for your tweets and your blog. I have been completely blown away by Wikileaks since January 2007, when Julien Assange and a co-founder were just getting Wikileaks off the ground. They spoke to 50 of us in a workshop at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, and they were just getting the site off the ground. They were savvy, all right, but I wouldn't ever have expected to see this brilliant infrastructure they've created, and the strategy behind their moves (very clever to release documents to a few media outlets first and tighten the supply). I would agree with the assessment you've made, that the hard-hitting big news is oftentimes too much to swallow. Cognitive dissonance happens. It almost becomes disempowering, when there isn't something tangible one can do in response to the raw stories shared. Wikileaks' release of the Collateral Murder video earlier this year caused some collective anger and depression, and I'm sure an even greater amount of cognitive dissonance. Still, it likely moved more people than not, and helped transform the public's view of war. And hopefully the public outcry (louder and louder with each real view of what this war has been like) can shift the rule-making elites' cognitive dissonance out of neutral gear. Also, in the absolutely brilliant department -- the tactic of leaking narrated documents to major news media outlets, but also releasing them in full untouched form on the website. Clever, and holds newspapers accountable in important ways. Assange, the founder of Wikileaks is quoted as saying: "you can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism." I'll keep thinking on this. Thx. -@losanjalis Lots of great points, especially no.8. The reaction of inaction because "the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes" could be extended from national security structures (fighting war, creating and maintaining secrets, even the moronic TSA) to the media itself. The ONLY positive thing to see in this, and it might be going to far, is how Wikileaks is creating a newer, more open model for real journalism. However, that model won't work if the media covers the WH's pathetic cries of "they didn't call us" or "OMG NATIONAL SECURITY / nothing new here" as real responses. Posted by: bwunderlick at July 26, 2010 4:11 AM | Permalink While I agree with your whole analysis of the "Stateless News Organization" and it's importance, and think WikiLeaks could be explosive with some stories, after reading the various newspaper reports I came away with a big yawn - Didn't find much different from any war (it's always a mess), didn't find the fact that the government/military didn't always report "everything" unusual (don't think they should) and a bunch of disparate reports not necessarily reflective of the whole. Not sure anyone could build an accurate story from field reports. Kind of curious if other ground-pounder veterans view this particular story as I do. Posted by: PXLated at July 26, 2010 4:29 AM | Permalink Splendid work here, Jay. Every point a winner. Those about the stateless news and #8, the Unapproachable, are esp high in value added. Just as banks can be too big to fail, some problems -- healthcare, certain wars, the intelligence mess, the PTSD mess I spoke about at NYU -- are Too Big to Think About. So exposure doesn't generate the narrative we're used to hoping for; Woodward and Bernstein get some admiring tweets, but neither the WH, Congress, nor the public reacts. It's like that lovely Dylan song, I'm forgetting which album: "I got my hammer ringing, baby, but the nails ain't going down." Yours are driving true here, though. Great stuff. Posted by: David Dobbs at July 26, 2010 7:17 AM | Permalink The blogosphere is a stateless news organization. Posted by: Dave Winer at July 26, 2010 7:57 AM | Permalink "Can't think of any prior example"? Try Ground Report. I totally agree with your conclusion - and in many ways believe it gets to the core of what we deal with every day - that not only do we want to do good journalism, but, we also want people to care and react and create change because of the good journalism we all strive to do. Like you, I don't have the answer - but it does concern me that now, more than ever, it seems grabbing the attention of our readers in this world where we all seem so easily distracted by the ton of information competing for our time and interest, is the challenge we all face. Posted by: Jack Kramer at July 26, 2010 8:17 AM | Permalink Don't ignore the moral dimension. Each person processes each activity following a particular context. Most people have two contexts for each activity: their "real context", the one they actually follow; and their "preferred context", the one they prefer to believe (and try to convince others) they follow. To be moral in a situation is to follow a real context that leads to a successful outcome: a result that is viable through to excellent, and the participant enjoys the process (from have fun through to thorough enjoyment). Also, the history of the world is best understood as how the world's citizenry responded to the consciousness present in every person at each specific moment in history. And the consciousness that has been present in everyone since the 1960's is one of "you can be optimal in every area of your life; progress to where you consistently produce a successful outcome in every activity you do on a regular basis". And most people are running away from that responsibility; thereby more and more following real contexts that are immoral, and more and more inventing preferred contexts that are significant misrepresentations of what occurs. Everyone internally knows that how the government functions is reflective of the real contexts of the majority of the citizenry. So as the personnel of the federal government has more and more since the 1950's operated from real contexts that are more and more immoral, in direct violation of various explicit Constitutional statements, more and more the public has developed a capacity to be informed (be aware of the talking points of the talking heads of our major media organizations), and yet totally ignore what our government is actually doing. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the drum beating for war in Iran, is totally immoral, totally lacking in any rational justification, yet supported by the majority of Americans, who ostrich like further and further stick their heads in the sand to avoid seeing what despicable we have become. The Post articles on national security boondoggle and Wikileaks post on Afghanistan tomfoolery must be ignored so most of the citizenry of the US continue to avoid seeing how immoral and sick have become their own personal lives and approach to most of their daily activities. Posted by: Warren Metzler at July 26, 2010 8:26 AM | Permalink Your comment inside point #8 is incredibly insightful: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” This is the root cause behind why the UFO phenonema is not covered or discussed much intelligently in public discourse. The proof itself is simply undeniable given the mountains of evidence that are readily available at the fingertips of anyone with internet access. Yet, this subject does not get discussed because our ruling class has gone too far down the primrose path, 1) hiding the evidence for the past 60 years via denial and active disinformation campaigns, 2) spending hundreds upon hundreds of untold billions on "black" ufo projects, and 3) figuring out a way to tell the public what they've been doing re: ufos and the fact that we as a civilization are still powerless in doing anything about them. Not to mention having to deal with the religious upheaval that would be caused by acknowledging their existence. Posted by: Doug at July 26, 2010 8:34 AM | Permalink Excellent post. Thanks. Concerning the White House - it is clear that it worked with the NY Times in reviewing the documents since as you note the NY Times became its agent in attempting to persuade Wikileaks to not publish certain documents. That is what makes the White House's response even more pathetic since it had time to prepare for it. I noted before to Glenn Greenwald that reading between the lines it is probable the NY Times would not have published the documents if it were the only recipient of them. Assange is correct when he says if it is made universally available it loses its value but on the other hand if made available to only one source (or in one country) it may be voluntarily suppressed by the news organizations. As a professor of journalism you may know the answer to this question. When the NY Times published the Pentagon Papers it did it in defiance of the White House. Here it seemed to have published the diaries working with the White House. Having read in the Washington Post about the vast amounts of money that is being spent by our secret government and knowing the financial difficulties of the NY Times, is the NY Times a recipient of the the Government's largesse which has made it compromise its independence in certain areas (as we've seen with the word 'torture')? Again, thanks for the post. It is a keeper. Posted by: mattconnolly at July 26, 2010 8:38 AM | Permalink CORRECTION ALERT Ben Smith didn't write that quote. It's his blog, but he is on vacation right now. If you read the bottom, it shows that Politico.com's Glenn Thrush wrote it. Thanks. Corrected in text. Posted by: CORRECTION at July 26, 2010 8:39 AM | Permalink I don't agree with this "Blogosphere is Stateless" stuff. If that were true, why is Wikileaks just not based in Arlington like Politico or Los Angeles like Big Government and Huffington Post? Instead Wikileaks people running around to Reykjavík and then to Antananarivo. Bloggers are people. You don't think it matters then you have NYU attached to this blog through your employer? Posted by: disagree at July 26, 2010 8:50 AM | Permalink The idea journalists using a structure patterned after terrorist organizations is remarkable. Truth cells? There will still need to be independent verification which will require cooperation from state bound news agencies. We can't under estimate the importance of anonymity in safeguarding liberty any longer. Posted by: Mark Essel at July 26, 2010 8:56 AM | Permalink RE: Point 5 You just have to compare the difference between this leak and the previous one (Iraq Apache video). Although the video of children being shot at was much more powerful and emotive than this documentary archive of data, the previous story had far less take-up around the world. It certainly didn't make front page news in the UK. Supply and demand accounted for that. Of course, the sheer amount of data also helped to ensure better coverage for this story, combined with what was actually a fairly textbook use of a triple "global PR excusive" strategy. Publications were able to take their own angle out of the data and create a story themselves that was of suitable importance and complexity to take up a number of pages.(A UK precedent would be the Daily Telegraphs repeated reporting of MP's expenses over several weeks) It remains to be seen what the response of the military intelligence community will be to what is the most serious threat to their control over their own information posed by Wikileaks thus far. Posted by: Joe Rudkin at July 26, 2010 9:05 AM | Permalink As always, makes me wonder how we prepare our kids for this type of "news organization." But what really resonated is the idea that the story is just too big to really deal with. Reminds me of so many other stories we just don't want to get the clear fix on: climate, education, etc. To fix that stuff requires a whole lot of unlearning which we're just not willing to do. Posted by: Will Richardson at July 26, 2010 9:10 AM | Permalink The rather large difference between this leak and the Apache Helicopter leak is that one is text and one is "expected" video (helicopters shoot enemies) with horrifying audio (acknowledgment of the callous indiscrimancy of "war" and war fighters--ie, no "honor"). The video is quick and easy and immediate. The text leak is the "art" of politics. We are too cynical to care anymore. One kind of person knows all this already (the banal evil of state action); one kind of person thinks it's all justified in the war of US v THEM. Posted by: Storm at July 26, 2010 9:20 AM | Permalink Wikileaks is wrong in thinking that it needs to give the story to only two or three big-name media outlets. It now has leverage it can use to adopt a system used by peer-reviewed journals in the sciences. By providing information under embargo to trusted journalists worldwide, and in advance of publication, it would level the global playing field and give writers time to report the findings in a way that prevents a culturally narrow interpretation of data and information. Posted by: Coimbra Sirica at July 26, 2010 9:25 AM | Permalink (Sorry about the length of this comment, I got carried away!) I think Dave Winer's comment about the blogosphere was based on the effect it creates, which is emergent, whereas Wikileaks has the same effect by design. Individual blogs are rarely set up redundantly to avoid being shut down by the government of the country where they are hosted. I can't think of a single blog that couldn't be 'turned off' by an enthusiastic government. However, by virtue of the way in which interesting content is copied and pasted onto other blogs, and in blog comments, a single explosive story will almost certainly spread to blogs based in multiple physical countries much quicker than the original blog could be silenced. So we get an emergent behaviour that looks exactly like planned redundancy. I believe that's what Dave Winer was talking about. With Wikileaks, we have the same end result, but it's contained entirely within a single root domain name and the redundancy is designed into the system from day one purely because they *expect* to be shut down in certain countries. There was a case a year or so ago when a single Judge in the US caused the wikileaks.org domain and US-based server to be shut down very quickly after UBS (the Swiss bank) asked for this action. The wikileaks.org address stopped working but the content was already on multiple overseas servers and they simply had to publicise the various URLs that could now be used instead of the .org address. I believe this has been improved now so that the .org address will continue to work no matter what gets turned off. Anyway, Dave Winer's comment about the blogosphere, while accurate in one sense, is still pointless because it's not the first example of such a thing. USENET has had this characteristic for decades, and before that the BBS systems like FIDOnet showed exactly the same characteristic. I could even go back to the 1980s and talk about the dial-up networks used by software pirates, some of which had the same ability to survive attacks from multiple physical locations. The same architecture (implemented with modern networks and software)is used by the modern-day equivalents such as the Pirate Bay.
It's also significant that Wikileaks has this protection because of the inherently *political* and secret nature of their work, not just because what they are doing is illegal. Posted by: Neil McLachlan at July 26, 2010 9:42 AM | Permalink This is more fruit, I think, of your "atomization overcome" than anything else, Jay. In a hyperconnected universe, where power runs horizontally instead of top-down, there is no "elite" to "get the message and reform the system." We are the elites. Where this will lead is anybody's guess, but I suspect that "government of the people" will be redefined. Our representatives will be forced to do a better job on behalf of the collective rather than support their own self interest, and that would be a good thing. Of course, we could just as easily come to the conclusion that omniscience isn't the great thing we thought it would be, for the human mind may not wish to be so crowded. Posted by: Terry Heaton at July 26, 2010 9:46 AM | Permalink Yes Jay, the system is broken, and the exponential growth in clearances compounds the problems. Posted by: anonymous at July 26, 2010 10:03 AM | Permalink I think this situation is pretty clear. We now have the information/internet/data industrial complex that is agnostic as to ideology, purpose or something as banal as whats good for "my" country. Rather it is what is good for my income statement. So the result is the atomization of any community identity. Posted by: truthseeker at July 26, 2010 10:03 AM | Permalink I think this situation is pretty clear. We now have the information/internet/data industrial complex that is agnostic as to ideology, purpose or something as banal as whats good for "my" country. Rather it is what is good for my income statement. So the result is the atomization of any community identity. Posted by: truthseeker at July 26, 2010 10:05 AM | Permalink Insightful analysis, as usual, Jay. I wrote about the first point you raise in a post last night. Excerpt: Assange is stating the value of an embargo to the embargoing institution in plain terms, far more directly than the journals and scientific societies that show up on Embargo Watch regularly seem to be willing to do. Posted by: Ivan Oransky at July 26, 2010 10:12 AM | Permalink Why isn't there a greater reaction? Among other things, I'd say convenience and engrams. It's inconvenient to understand how the entire system functions (not to mention depressing) and even more to the point, our engrams are too deeply etched to really register information that doesn't fit our learned worldview. Oh, of course, our left brains may be able to memorize such information, say for a test. But it won't stick. And it won't blend with our deepest assumptions. Colin McGinn defined the phrase "cognitive closure" as "domains of knowledge where our brains are wired in a way that makes it impossible for us to acquire certain kinds of knowledge." Allowing for some gray areas, I think that pretty well nails it. This report, like the WaPo series, is just another boring channel. Honey, there must be something else on. In other words, it's hard to even get interested in things that one doesn't already have some comprehension of. If you're American, try to watch a half dozen World Cup games to know what this feels like for most of you. Posted by: Terry5135 at July 26, 2010 10:15 AM | Permalink The story is secrecy and the efforts used to reveal information. Posted by: nallen11 at July 26, 2010 10:29 AM | Permalink "But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible?" We could say that this is the very situation we are facing with regard to our (the U.S.) ostensible goals in Afghanistan which are noble and lofty enough to make at least some level of sacrifice worthwhile. What seems to make one gargantuan goal achievable and another just too big? At what point does the seemingly limitless American hubris break down? Posted by: Steve Noble at July 26, 2010 10:34 AM | Permalink Very well thought out analysis. There's this about Wikileaks: while it certainly has a point of view, it is not irrational or irresponsible. Wikileaks smartly tries to vet the leaks its receives, but its resources are limited. Giving the information to established news organizations helps Wikileaks verify the authenticity and importance of the documents. If I am reading the reports correctly, it has 15,000 more(?) documents it intends to release, but not before it redacts the documents to provide safety for people "on the ground." About the more general question of why and how certain things "make news" and other things are ignored. Remember, even with the publication of the Pentagon Papers it didn't matter; the killing continued. When publishing a story could have mattered, as about the secret wiretapping, etc. under the Bush Administration, the NYT decided not to publish. I doubt if national security was more at risk in 2004 than it is today or was in 1971. Will news organizations now take a logical next step and chip in to fund Wikileaks? We can only hope. Posted by: Konstantin Doren at July 26, 2010 10:37 AM | Permalink Why isn't there a greater reaction? It's much too soon to judge the reaction. As a matter of fact, although the U.S. corporate media has been paying almost no attention, the entire Bush/Blair GWOT has been blowing up into a hurricane of expose and recrimination in the UK. It will be very surprising if there are any NATO troops other than Americans in Afghanistan by the end of next year. These leaked cables actually add very little to the pretty clear picture of reality we've had for a long time now. There are no particular explosive revelations here -- the import is only sharpen the image quality and draw attention to what we already know. The ultimate reaction and import really depend on how this interacts with momentum that already exists. Give it a few weeks. I see a connection between the former blog entry on the power of access and the entry today regarding risk. In the former, access to information comes at a cost of self-censorship (the veteran reporter unwilling to alienate a source). But Wikileaks changes the risk calculus in three ways. The first two are defenses against reprisal, thus decreasing risk: 1) statelessness 2) source protection. The first secures the second. The third increases reward: 3) exclusivity, which as Assange explains increases perceived value. Less risk, more reward. In light, then, of the combination of traditional and new media that Prof. Rosen explains in #5, how will the practice of cultivating sources change in response to this new environment? Will the distinction between access to sources of information and sources of confirmation become more or less important? Posted by: cate at July 26, 2010 10:46 AM | Permalink A defacto Internet state (Netstate) is emerging, and this is terrifying to existing nation states. The history of the next few decades will be dominated by a furious and futile struggle in which nation states try to assert control over an increasingly powerful unitary global Internet. The gross failure of today's "political scientists" to grasp the political implications of universal free instantaneous digital communication will be noted with puzzlement by future historians. Posted by: HH at July 26, 2010 10:54 AM | Permalink It's "Germany’s Der SpIEgel" not SpEIgel ;-) Great article! The dilemma you explained in 8. is especially concerning, since such a "small" thing as attention management has the potential to deflect the entire journalistic effort of WikiLeaks :-( The effect of ignoring problems, because they are beyond our comprehension is well known in psychology. Think organ donation. Have you made a decision about it, filled out an organ donor pass and talked to your family about your decision? The most effective thing to do (for citizens and the media) is probably to keep the issue boiling. Tell people, write to your representatives, help WikiLeaks and teach your children to run around with eyes and mind open :-) Posted by: LifeScienTology at July 26, 2010 11:06 AM | Permalink As an aside, #8 reminds me of an anecdote in Yannis Stavrakakis' Lacan and the Political. The Imperial Archive was supposedly a vast clearinghouse of information that monitored all happenings across the British Empire--information and order that were necessary to maintain power. But it was a fantasy. The Imperial Archive was a myth used to justify continued expansion, even as that expansion outstripped the possibility of actual political control over far-flung regions: "In this utopian space, disorder was transformed into order, heterogeneity into homogeneity and lack of political control and information into an imaginary empire of knowledge and power" (p. 81). This is all to say that I think your fears are well-justified. The discovery that our own Intelligence Archive is a fiction may be overwhelmed by dependence on the idea of the Archive. Posted by: cate at July 26, 2010 11:08 AM | Permalink Complexity is a killer. Piece together a story of thousand facts rotating in a malstrom, and the best you can hope for is applause from the journalists. Tiger Woods is just so much easier to sell. Facts are overrated, classified facts very much so. Symbols are potent. Remember the black and white photo of the naked screaming napalm girl? Remember My Lai? Remember the photos from Abu Graib? Posted by: GSo at July 26, 2010 11:08 AM | Permalink I think this leak and the blogosphere reaction to it highlights a crucial failing of the Obama administration. We need a coherent and honest explanation of some confusing and difficult circumstances here. We are dealing with murky and ambivalent governments in Afpak, and if we stop doing so their resources and people are likely to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. Imagine the US nuke arsenal in the hands of the militias of Idaho, and American women subject to retrograde sexist strictures. It is also true that our own military has conflicting views on how to handle the guerilla warfare in Afpak, and many of the commanders still think that brute, brutal force is best. But except when the President speaks in reaction to something like this leak, we don't get that kind of communication. It is not enough that Obama's intelligence and good will are widely respected. The people in charge of his political operation, such as David Axelrod, need to provide a stream of information about the situation, why we are there, what we are doing, and what the prospects are. Without it, they leave the public to the tender mercies of duplicitous self-aggrandizing groups and Fox News. The Wikileaks information would have a very different impact if the Obama Administration were paying more attention to keeping the public properly informed. Posted by: Keith Roberts at July 26, 2010 11:11 AM | Permalink Another interesting thing that is new here is WikiLeaks' approach of "competitive crowdsourcing": releasing these documents in a way that utilizes the natural competitiveness of news organizations as one form of accountability, combining it (as you note) with the added layer of scrutiny that promises to come from the blogosphere. (Though I wonder how and to what degree did the news organizations collaborate with one another?) I haven't yet compared all of the Times's, Guardian's and Der Spiegel's coverage yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if each organization highlighted different nuggets within the trove, and that the blogosphere will also. At first, this result seems to be a helpful benefit of crowdsourcing. Significant information is less likely to be overlooked, and it is possible that a clearer picture will emerge, honed by many professional and semi-pro hands, than would have been possible otherwise. On the other hand, there may be a disadvantage: there may be so many stories within the documents that it may prevent a clear narrative from emerging of what these documents mean. If the result is an accurate, but confusing portrait of reality, aren't citizens likely to throw up their hands in frustration, unable to act? If the outcome is a fog of dischordant stories, won't goverments be able to continue to evade accountability? Won't a deeply flawed status quo be permitted to continue, unreformed? It will be interesting to see what this experiment produces. Posted by: John McCrory at July 26, 2010 11:14 AM | Permalink Thanks for these thoughtful observations, everyone. Keep 'em coming. Meanwhile I added a number 9 to my points 1-8. 9. Few people realize how important leaking has been to the rise of the political press since the mid-18th century. Leaks were actually “present at the creation” of political reporting. I’m moving quickly this morning, so I only have time for a capsule version. Those with a richer knowledge of the British Parliament’s history can confirm or correct this outline. Once upon a time, Parliament’s debates were off limits to newspapers. But eventually, through a long period of contestation, the right to report on what was said in Parliament was securely won (though not constitutionally guaranteed.) John Wilkes is the pivotal figure and 1770 the date when the practice became institutionalized. If someone has a good link for this Parliamentary history, I'd love to add it. Jay, Thanks for posting this, I appreciate your honesty in analyzing the reaction and recognizing that it's not a jaded populace that will not know how to carry the torch forward, but rather it's the mark of a broken system that looks at a monumental problem and reflexively treats it as un-fixable. I agree too that cognitive dissonance is one of the biggest problems, and in America we're quite practiced at choosing not to look at our beliefs under a microscope to see if they're true or not. Assange is leading the charge on a spectacular mission here, and I wish for him nothing but success. It would be fantastic if he were able to inspire others to do the same, but it's obviously not a job for the weak of stomach. I look forward to more countries becoming like Iceland, which just passed a law that establishes it as the most progressive nation in the world on freedom of the press. It seems that they took their moment of revelation following the financial crisis and made the right kind of radical change, whereas in America we simply turned our frustration and injustice into a toothless financial "reform" bill to which Wall Street offered only token opposition. I'd like very much to be an optimistic person, and Assange is probably our best bet in helping to restore journalistic integrity. The backlash is already severe from the mainstream media and will only get worse, but the Wikileaks model is sound and I hope that we see further successes from them in the future. @Terry Heaton -- In a hyperconnected universe, where power runs horizontally instead of top-down, there is no "elite" to "get the message and reform the system." Surely, the opposite is the case here. Why did Wikileaks.org decide to privilege The Guardian, The New York Times and der Spiegel? Because it understood these precisely to be elite institutions, venues where their whistleblowers would get most leverage from their revelations. So Rosen’s point #7 is off the mark. The whistleblowers were not confronted with a choice between newspapers and Wikileaks.org. Rather Wikileaks.org became the new, safer, preferred conduit for delivery of the leaked material to those traditional, elite journalistic institutions. Both the decision by Assange to use a selective embargo for maximum political impact and Rosen’s worry in point #8 about whether this entire scoop -- or Top Secret America, for that matter -- may fail to facilitate political change is an interesting revisiting of the bright line that PressThink drew just three posts ago. In Fixing the Ideology Problem… Rosen, correctly, insisted that journalism is not politics by other means: “Power seeking and truth seeking are different behaviors,” he asserted. Yet in #8, Rosen steps back towards that bright line, now not seeming so bright. If the criterion for the successful coverage of whistleblowing leaks is to measure how much impact it has on changing public policy, then the test of this journalism becomes not its truth value but its resulting efficacy. Following this, it is important for journalism that its major institutions -- such as Times, Guardian, Spiegel -- have credibility, prestige and reach because it is only by virtue of such institutional power that their truthtelling will have political clout. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 26, 2010 11:37 AM | Permalink An amusing theme of many of the comments is that the public will apply rational analysis to the revelations of the Afghanistan leaks. If the public craves war, what does it care for the dirtiness of the details. The notion of an educated and peace-loving American electorate rationally incorporating new information to steer foreign policy prudently is as funny as the concept of efficient markets performing optimally as rational investors use public information to prudently manage their investments. These national myths, enshrined by the press, are now so obviously disconnected from America's financial and foreign policy disasters that one wonders how much longer they can be sustained. Posted by: HH at July 26, 2010 11:39 AM | Permalink Re: #9 (Britain, Parliament, & Leaking) The Official Secrets Act, first enacted in the late 1800s, is the maypole of leaking activity in England. Journalists and newspapers can get whacked under the Act for publishing anything secret a government servant/employee/elected official leaked to them. National or public interest doesn't count, it's not a permissible reason for leaks in Britain. There is only one loophole: if the secret info has been 'published officially', you can't convict. This is the iffy part, and it's all cat-and-mouse. You need to get the info published in the parliamentary record, or in a newspaper as part of a bigger story, and the leak has to be benign on its face or someone is going to jail. But savvy leakers know that the leak should point to something, like an arrowhead on the ground pointing NE. The projectile point of the flint is endemic, it's the nature of the beast. So you have a much harder time proving the arrowhead points in a certain direction for a reason if the thing is pointy to begin with. Posted by: MRW at July 26, 2010 11:57 AM | Permalink Your point about the story being too big reminds me of the old line about how one person dead is a tragedy, two people dead is a horrible tragedy, 10,000 people dead is a sanitation problem. Posted by: Scott Yates at July 26, 2010 12:04 PM | Permalink Possible droped "not" in para 4: Posted by: xpara at July 26, 2010 12:12 PM | Permalink There's a more critical issue here that Wikileaks has to address (has addressed): the digital equivalent of the morgue, and making sure the data doesn't get siphoned into one spot where is can be quietly removed from the face of the earth two years from now. Iceland is taking action to be an investigative reporter's haven, but there still exists the threat that someone will be able to wipe out its servers in future, and the servers worldwide that replicate its data. Parking the data with the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel ensures that, at least, one out of the three will be preserved. We may not be able to make sense of the massive Pentagon data dump this week or next month, but it must be there when someone astute and diligent enough is ready to make sense of it. You can bet someone in the Pentagon is working on a destructive worm right now to prevent leaks like this one from happening in the future. I preserved tens of gigabytes of important stories since 1995. I discovered subsequently that 40% were wiped from their original sources and archive.org. When the only publication is online, it is vitally important to PDF what you can for posterity. Posted by: MRW at July 26, 2010 12:18 PM | Permalink why is ASSange not exposing Israels brutal crimes against Arabs? Im glad he is releasing videos and documents but he needs to expose Israhells brutal crimes against humanity. Posted by: IH8Zionists at July 26, 2010 12:52 PM | Permalink Look at the history of the press successfully making a complex issue something that matters to the public. For a good, historical example, look at the Watergate coverage in 1972-74. The reason this coverage became a major political influence was the extended and repeated nature of the stories that traced the entire history of the break-in and more importantly the cover-up. A single story, or even a week-long series of stories that neatly tied up Watergate would not have had nearly the same impact as the two-plus years of continuing coverage. There is a lot of inertia built in to the system, not least because of the systemic malfunction already mentioned in the post, but that inertia can be overcome by extended efforts. One could say that the growing unpopularity of the AfPak war is already evidence that this is occurring. Why this hasn't happened in the realm of climate change is beyond my understanding. Posted by: Christopher Bartlett at July 26, 2010 12:56 PM | Permalink "The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible?" Two points. This is the exact situation in the financial calamity which encompasses the entire banking and financial sphere and the government and quasi governmental Fed. It's too big. Second point. The elites don't want reform. They profit too much the way things are. It is a profound mistake to believe for one moment that they care about the people of Afghanistan or our soldiers or the cost. Much less the millions of households ruined by debt. They don't care. Reform is not possible from within. History and events will sweep the elites away or aside but they will not relinquish one fraction of an inch voluntarily. They never have in history and never will. Posted by: rapier at July 26, 2010 1:19 PM | Permalink Not only are the elites incorrible, they have assembled mercenary armies of "experts," propagandists, and miscellaneous flacks to defend them against all threats foreign and domestic. Nothing offensive to the wealthy and powerful in America can be said without an instantaneous defensive reaction from the Limbaughs, McArdles, and Brooks of the noble journalistic order of Defenders Of the Rich. Posted by: HH at July 26, 2010 1:34 PM | Permalink Interesting that there is resistance from Bill Keller on the notion of "collaboration" among the four players: Assange said, "we had Der Spiegel and New York Times and us in a collaborative basement [in London], if you like, working on this material." As Times/Guardian/Spiegel is to Assange so FOX News Channel is to Breitbart. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 26, 2010 2:12 PM | Permalink Ah yes, Bill Keller, the crusading editor who delayed the Bush illegal wiretap story long enough for Bush to be re-elected and substituted "harsh interrogation" for "torture" when Bush told him to. More recently, Keller has been running a series of exciting GI combat stories about our brave boys and girls in Afghanistan. Were it not for Bill Keller, Americans would never know about our courageous helicopter rescue crews saving soldiers wounded by the Taliban devils. It is Keller's deep understanding of world events that allows him to simultaneously cover the "war" in Afghanistan as a thrilling patriotic saga and a FUBAR fiasco. Surely this is a great editor of the Newspaper of Record! When comes such another? Posted by: HH at July 26, 2010 2:24 PM | Permalink But really . . . there's nothing new here is correct. I mean, we know Pakistan was trying to appease the Taliban - gave them the Swat Valley for Pete's sake, (http://www.slate.com/id/2213246), until all the people who live were running for their lives under the brutality, and in the end, giving them the Swat Vally, really just made them bolder. In fact, it was one of the turning points for Pakistan, where they started to fight back, that and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Seems to me, the only thing new in this is probably valuable intelligence which could be used to hurt out troops. I don't get it. It's all in the scoop isn't it. Nothing else matter. Well, "Bubble Boy" was a scoop too. Posted by: Teri Beaugez at July 26, 2010 2:24 PM | Permalink If the criterion for the successful coverage of whistleblowing leaks is to measure how much impact it has on changing public policy, then the test of this journalism becomes not its truth value but its resulting efficacy. Following this, it is important for journalism that its major institutions -- such as Times, Guardian, Spiegel -- have credibility, prestige and reach because it is only by virtue of such institutional power that their truthtelling will have political clout. Interesting point, Andrew. As much as I find the term "institutional power" to be distasteful, I can't help but agree with you. I think that for all the talk about "power to the people," in the end, the "people," unfortunately, really just don't want to be bothered. Posted by: Terry Heaton at July 26, 2010 3:20 PM | Permalink Terry -- If the criterion... It is the If that is the important point. I think it probably puts too much distorting pressure on journalism to demand that it not only seeks truth -- difficult enough -- but also helps effect change. And your suspicion of institutional power is well-founded. If that is the price to be paid for journalism to have political clout then it is probably too high. After all, Assange's decision to grant exclusives to those three elite institutions was not a journalistic decision. In that capacity, he was acting as a PR pitchman for his scoop, like any flack, not a truth-telling reporter. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 26, 2010 3:52 PM | Permalink Power seeking and truth seeking are different behaviors, Andrew. In between them we find influence-seeking for a truthful account. This is am ambiguous pursuit, I grant you that. But it is not the same as power-seeking behavior, which will always treat truthtelling as an instrumental thing. Methinks the facts do overwhelm. The youth see the hatred and venom of the "conservatives". They realize they will do anything required, right up to killing, to protect the illusion that their decisions and opinions are "right". Any justification will be used to assuage their choices that they have the correct answer. The loss of motivation to fix things here in the US is lost on the youth of this country, because they know they cannot change the powerstructures voted in by straight ticket voting by the Republicans. They youth helped bring in a President who could change things, and he has failed them because he won't clean out the Justice Department, and the Supreme court has legalized the status of corporations as persons. As we pile our debts on the heads of our children to protect our dividends, and take away their rights to protect their commons, we have doomed them to a life where the differences between the haves, and have nots not only set up a caste system here, it removes the rule of law from their protection. Clear out the Justice Department, and reconvene the Church Committee. Move to ammend the votes of the Supreme Court in favor of Monsanto, and the good faith of our public servants. It is the least we can do for our grandchildren, and the most we can expect from Obama. Posted by: Morganism at July 26, 2010 4:19 PM | Permalink "Ambiguous pursuit," precisely, Jay. That is why I commented that you were stepping back towards that bright line, making it seem not so bright -- but, granted, certainly not erasing it. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 26, 2010 4:29 PM | Permalink The Hansard started in 1803: This is the site for Parliamentary History, but from the looks of it, they're in the middle of doing it. Posted by: MRW at July 26, 2010 5:22 PM | Permalink This weekend's "This American Life" aired a story about government secrecy. (not yet posted to their archives yet, but check http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives for it later). The show describes a Supreme Court precedent that lets the government legally withhold evidence, citing national security concerns. In that particular case, the government denied the claims of the widows and orphans created by a B-29 bomber test flight crash. Ultimately, the court denied the plaintiffs a look at the crash report, because disclosing the crash report would disclose something secret, and damaging to national security. Without examining the crash report themselves, the Supreme Court ruled that citizens would have to trust the government when it said national security was at stake. Ever since, the government has relied on this precedent to deny plaintiffs access to just about anything it can classify as secret. Fast forward to recent times, and that B-29 crash report (the basis of the SCOTUS 1953 decision) has been de-classified. Guess what?... It contained *nothing* about any secret program, and revealed that the Air Force was negligent in maintaining the plane. In other words [gasp!], the government lied! As a postscript, Ira Glass (the "This American Life" narrator) notes that a bill has been stalled in congress that would require that the judge in such national security trials be allowed to see whether the documents being withheld on national security grounds contain anything secret. This needs to get a lot more attention. Posted by: demockracy at July 26, 2010 5:50 PM | Permalink What effect is this supposed to have, beyond increased information awareness? The "people" have a lot to do (name anything you want), this story exposes an issue that doesn't affect almost anyone in an observable, direct way to demand a reaction (few people are soldiers and there's no conscription). If you are dedicated to a position (on the left you "just don't want" america to be in afghanistan and on the right "america must win against islam"), you'll just have a simplistic dismissal or nod of approval towards information that contradicts/supports your will power and desire. And you'll go about your life. The only effect may be on so called independent voters for whom the given story details a problem they value highly but are unsure of judging. If those independents are in fact very rare and if in fact in the US so called "independents" are mostly conservatives who are either timid about admitting partisanship or just think it's more exciting to be an "independent republican" then this will REALLY have next to no effect. The people have no time for reaction to information unless it affects them personally. Posted by: infodealer at July 26, 2010 5:56 PM | Permalink As an afficianado of all things military, I will pore through the entire stash upon return from vacation. However, upon cursory acquaintance, there does not seem to be anything in the document dump that followers of the war did not already know. We get the paradox: the American military have never been better or more at the top of their game, they have figured out counterinsurgency (the lowliest Marine has to know 400 words of Dari, for heaven´s sake); nevertheless, we are losing the war against the Taliban big time. There may be 90,000 documents. But it looks like their immediate effect will be to educate people who did not already know that war is nasty work. That is a good thing. But what is needed to effect what I conclude Assange wants, namely the end to the war in Afghanistan, he does not provide. Our problems in country are not military but political. Only if Assange had some documents about the craziness and corruption and delusions of Hamid Karzai, or about the detailed ways in which our millions of aid end up in private Swiss bank accounts, would the latest Assange Wikileak have an effect on American foreign policy. This has nothing to do with theories of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, my take is that the document dump will have zero effect on American foreign policy. Americans themselves, ourselves, hate the war and have been dubious about it for years but feel powerless to do anything about it. An interesting question is why this is so different from the Vietnam War era. Why have we lost our collective will to protest a war? Is this an unintended consequence of the farther reach of government over the last half century? On the other hand, I would argue that the release of these communiques is damaging in the context of providing our frenemies and enemies a door into our thinking and operations. Iran, Pakistan, India, China--all are poring over what they can learn about the way we wage war. Whoever gave these documents to Wikileaks, and I have little doubt that the person has already been identified, has committed treason. The issue here for media is not about media per se but about the place of media in society. Where is our larger allegiance? Posted by: Mayhill Fowler at July 26, 2010 6:20 PM | Permalink Jay -- I think I see daylight between your job description here of "influence seeking for a truthful account" and your earlier one that it is a journalist's job "to tell people what’s going on, and equip them to participate without illusions." Am I mistaken? Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 26, 2010 6:37 PM | Permalink Hi Jay, it's me, that professor person. Absolutely great article. I found this via http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/62054 I clicked on the link to your quote, and got here. ~~ diarist: ~~diarist writer quotes you (with link to here):
Your point "the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it." is absolutely crucial, obviously. Given that I (and another commentator) thought you had left out "not" I'd say that this is worth a bit more text from you, for those of us who didn't get it at first.
Posted by: Valley Girl at July 26, 2010 7:10 PM | Permalink Hi again Jay... I didn't read your piece before you updated with this- “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.” That is a great addition. But, I didn't think of adding a comment until I read this one: http://bit.ly/brTMgm What got me going was the first part- just because it made me think- (I'm not going one way or another on the comment, just to give you my thought process... ~~A defacto Internet state (Netstate) is emerging, and this is terrifying to existing nation states.~~~ My thought--- wow! this is the parallel or anti-parallel in some ways to the way earlier emergence of international corporations who have no responsibility to any nation. I'm thinking of BP here. I hope you get what I mean by "anti-parallel"- not a good phrase... I'm struggling for the right word... obverse? reverse? Posted by: Valley Girl at July 26, 2010 7:28 PM | Permalink Mayhill Fowler Americans themselves, ourselves, hate the war and have been dubious about it for years but feel powerless to do anything about it. ... Why have we lost our collective will to protest a war? Is this an unintended consequence of the farther reach of government over the last half century? vs. Whoever gave these documents to Wikileaks, and I have little doubt that the person has already been identified, has committed treason. Is it treason to stop a war? Posted by: MRW at July 26, 2010 7:28 PM | Permalink In regard to your point number eight, here is my sense of it. Wikileaks (and Cryptome.org and other similar sites) are the prototype of the new source of news. But not everyone will read them. In fact, very few will, because, frankly, most of the revelations are rather uninteresting and unimportant (such as Wikileaks' leaking of the Mormon church's endowment ceremony, for example). But what will happen is that activists, such as myself, will monitor such sites for significant new revelations, and will then alert our subscribers/web surfers to them. That information will then go viral as it quickly is passed from person to person among like-minded people. Will this lead to a public that is broadly educated in the issues of the day, as the Fourth Estate was charged with doing? I doubt it. But it will be at least a partial antidote for the endangered species of the investigative journalist. What WaPo did with their Top Secret Files project will become increasingly rare. What Assange did yesterday on Wikileaks will become increasingly common. The two will cancel. At least to some degree. Posted by: Scott Bidstrup at July 26, 2010 8:32 PM | Permalink "Each time the cycle is repeated, the press becomes a bigger factor in politics. And internal struggles for power remain to this day a major trigger for leaks. Conscience, of course, is a different trigger. Whistleblowers can be of either type: calculating advantage-seekers, or men and women with a troubled conscience. We don’t know which type provided the logs to Wikileaks." Yes we do Jay. It would be to the advantage of neither wing of the Corporatist Party (Democratic and Republican) to have this material become public. Clearly, the leaker was an idealist and a patriot. Posted by: Datasmith at July 26, 2010 8:46 PM | Permalink All this because the war has been sanitized and the American people are no longer allowed to see the bodies being unloaded at the morgue in Dover Delaware. If they were allowed to see the bodies it would bring this war to an end quicker than all the leaked document ever will. Posted by: plumbob at July 26, 2010 9:04 PM | Permalink The current issue of the Economist has a long article on the state-like characteristics of the Facebook community. The dawn of realization that the Internet can host a virtual state has finally arrived. But the full fruition of this state will not be as a hobby horse or an amusement park. It will be a powerful entity that can extend the full protections of citizenship to its members, and it will eventually dominate what remains of the existing geostates. The Netstate is an invincible meme. The geostates will kill to stop it, but they can't extinguish the Internet, which is vital to their own functioning. Because the evolution of the Internet is unstoppable, the rise of the Netstate is inevitable. Posted by: HH at July 26, 2010 9:17 PM | Permalink Just because a problem appears to be too big, sophisticated & intractable by the powers at be to be resolved hardly makes it so. Just the opposite. It's not even that every little bit helps & that every journey begins with a 1st step (although both are true). Bringing to bear all the attention of everyone, everywhere on it always leads to unexpected solutions we can barely guess at. Systemic solutions appear on their own & the system get restructured to resolve it. It requires the gathered focused attention of all to make this happen (CRITICAL). Incremental changes add up & grow exponentially to achieve fundamental & incontrovertibly worthwhile solutions - always. Creativity should never be underestimated. The human imagination allied with it can & does literally achieve miracles. Particularly today. Particularly when cynicism is not tolerated & TRUE brainstorming is facilitated from enough people in an open-minded way. These are indisputable facts. As is the only things that can derail this process - apathy & cynicism. Posted by: JohnP at July 26, 2010 9:49 PM | Permalink SPIEGEL: You are about to publish a vast amount of classified data on the war in Afghanistan. What is your motivation? Assange: These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war -- in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars. SPIEGEL: Do you think that the publication of this data will influence political decision-makers? Assange: Yes. This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence. My italics. @Mayflower and @ the idealist, JohnP, Mayflower, claiming an anti war position while accepting the impotence of the anti war public to take any action, however small, deduces that, because this will have no effect and does not educate americans with any NEW information, all it does is reveal to foreign nations (who, presumably we must always fear and assume underhanded, which I think is only partly true but still somewhat true), american secrets about methods of engagement. Therefore, the context of an apathetic public makes any subversive, rebellious, leaking to be an act of treason by default, because it only benefits foreign powers, by default. Obviously, that's the problem with any open society. Enemies can observe how you function. Do you want to live like an authoritarian regime, with the public blind to all major government actions to protect against that? But further, a question to ask: What if the public will react? Shouldn't any chance be taken to inform the public? If there is no new info here, then foreign powers ALREADY know the methods and at worst here are revealed some minor details. My personal question though isn't concerned with the paranoia of frightened old men who love to read war books and fantasize about being strong and accuse hippies of treason. Posted by: infodealer at July 26, 2010 10:53 PM | Permalink @ Jay Rosen, your italics about Assange's expectations reveal a will, a hope, not a reliable prediction. ASSANGE AND WIKILEAKS, activists, take action. But as you may have observed, activism is easily dismissed in the US precisely because it doesn't spread. The right accuses activists of being communistic brainwashers and the left accuse right wing activists of being conspiratorially fascist. This may be true or not, but in fact none of it seems to become a movement. The tea party are not gaining momentum just as the anti war protests on the eve of Iraq did not take hold of the whole country. Perhaps camille paglia (for all her flaws) was correct with her recent NYT piece, we are too middle class, too repressed and too meaninglessly individualistic and careerist to just "go for" some action (in her article the action was about sexual adventure but I think you could apply it to political action. even artistic.... ) Assange is not an american and perhaps has a better view of his own europe. This massive information publication may provide more fuel for anti war moves in the politics of multi party european nations. But the news that the europeans "aren't with" the USA anymore in AfPak, at all, should it come to pass, will hardly worry American pro war voters nor surprise anti war voters. Leaving aside a reaction from a political class that is so suffused with corruption and self regard that it seems to breathe better in toxic air than fresh (honestly, after seeing obama and the dems win and seeing what has come to pass, I feel like I've witnessed the end of all illusions about dem versus repub and some more creative politics are needed, simple as that). Maybe there's some other information, of a different kind, that's required? Anyone have any guesses as to what KIND OF INFO will get us off our duffs? Posted by: infodealer at July 26, 2010 11:09 PM | Permalink So this is a really good piece. I liked the way you pulled the president's pants down on that feeble response. And no, he doesn't have to say he is sorry. On point eight, I suppose it depends on how you define a big response. I dropped my face in my hands and cried. The concept you describe is treated in the psychological literature and its real. For me its a measure of my strength at the time how much evil and/or suffering I can witness in one sitting. On the cleverness of the release, I agree and offer the suggestion for the next release of putting the offer of early access on ebay or some other suitable auction venue. I wonder what amount Dick and George would bid for indictable video on them--oh, wait that is already in the public domain. I wonder if Holder or Obama have seen it yet. Posted by: conrad elledge at July 26, 2010 11:31 PM | Permalink I mean, if people are so concerned or ready to become concerned, how come one has to BELIEVE in that potential, like it were a religion, like it were Lucas' the Force, only very rarely seen, instead of it being a regular phenomenon? On the other hand, I'm still mystified that the Vietnam war ended. And it only makes sense to me because it was a zombie idiot president who didn't know his own venal interests well enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with the military industrial complex. Posted by: infodealer at July 26, 2010 11:34 PM | Permalink Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget. Jay, That would be a mess which you cannot fix and they would prefer to forget, but that is not to say that it cannot be fixed with IT and AI in a Lucid Wikileaks System of Secure Transparent and Covert Translucent Operation with the SMARTer Virtual Crowd PoweredD Cloud Control Levers, which are now freely available to All Greater Great Game Players/Non State Actors into Perfecting Excellence rather than just Minting COIN for Continuity of Global Mass Abuse and Pathetic Sub Prime Ministerial Executive MisUse Posted by: amanfromMars at July 26, 2010 11:50 PM | Permalink Thanks for the piece. I was talking to an educated, upper middle class friend of mine the other day, and I asked him if he felt he was well-informed of world affairs, and he said "yes, I watch Fox, CNN, and MSNBC on a regular basis". For him, and most Americans, the bet is lost at the first tee. Wikileaks seems wonderful, but it doesn't change who holds the audiences and manipulates their thinking. This stranglehold has to loosen before anything meaningful can happen. I can't help but feel that the internet should have changed TV more than it has. Posted by: psbjr at July 27, 2010 12:31 AM | Permalink
Posted by: thomas at July 27, 2010 1:16 AM | Permalink Jay, I appreciate your articles and tweets. I found your perspectives on the Bill Moyers show fascinating several months ago. This leak may not do much. It may not change much... That said it will introduce that nagging doubt in many voters. As for Manning, how can he be accused of treason when McChrystal leaked a classified assessment on Afghanistan. Why is there a double standard when a General leaks a document for political purposes versus a private leaking documents for naive reasons. I hear constant criticism of Manning yet McChrystal gets a free ride. Today's leaks will finally conjure up some sense of chaos the US military structure has fallen into since the Cold War. Its a monstrosity that has yet to adapt to a new world that is void of awesome superpowers planning great land wars. The lack of discipline is splintering down the chain of command, from the generals to the common infantryman. The dual reality many soldiers confront will slowly fade as the public becomes aware of the great difficulty the military has yet to confront. I do not expect any radical departure from the current war plans but I do sense a catharsis moment for the administration and serious war planners. Pakistan has always been the origin of the problem. How do a bunch of rag tag tribal leaders enforce complete submission of a populace? This isn't about democracy and nation building as much as a moment where the facts are laid bare and the time for practical realities in Afghanistan will be confronted. What has measured as success in Iraq and Afghanistan has been based on "activity" not "outcomes." We commit to many activities but not many outcomes. As for the new media... It's fascinating but I think its a new age. HH is correct about the NetState. The NetState is emerging. The marketplace much ensure it continued existence and virulent dissemination. Wikileaks is the first successful manifestation of an organism giving life to the NetState. Unfortunately James Orlin Grabbe did not live long enough to see it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Orlin_Grabbe Wikileaks is the first organism of the NetState. As long as crypto-anarchism can exist it will survive. The next organism of the NetState to emerge will be anonymous trading markets/anonymous digital banks. J Orlin Grabbe attempted it and some others are trying. These organisms will transplant themselves on the current institutions of the day and absorb them. They will exist as supranational entities in a stateless regime. Wikileaks gave privileged access to three large media outlets, but it got the better end of the deal, credibility. Given enough time, Wikileaks will have the credibility blindly given to these institutions. These changes are fast, unpredictable, and will exert themselves on elites and nonelities. Posted by: Nathan Engleton at July 27, 2010 1:36 AM | Permalink Someone (on this blog) said that they did not understand why the Vietnam War ever came to an end. The reason Vietnam came to an end is because of the numerous insurrections that occurred among conscripted US troops. Officers were getting fragged and many conscripted soldiers simply refused to take up arms. The US government has been accused of never learning anything from a war, but they quickly learned that they could never have unending wars of profit without an all volunteer army to fight it. They now have both, and the profits are pouring in. Posted by: plumbob at July 27, 2010 9:18 AM | Permalink Netstate citizenship will be enormously attractive to people who wish to escape from corrupt governments. The transparency and efficiency of a global virtual government will provide insuperable advantages over geostate parliaments and bureaucracies rotted out by secrecy and gangsterism. Although geostates will kill to stop the ascendancy of a global rival, the Netstate will evolve by such subtle increments that there will be few opportunities to resist it. One happy day, some of us will be able to carry Netstate passports and enjoy the protections of a powerful but honest world government. That day cannot come too soon. Posted by: HH at July 27, 2010 10:12 AM | Permalink It seems to me that a stateless news organization and a Netstate are two very different things, and that the former is more desirable than the latter. Posted by: cate at July 27, 2010 11:55 AM | Permalink Is there an organization with the prestige (and I use that word advisedly) of the Nobel Prizes that would be willing to give a peace prize or freedom award or some such to both Assange and to Pfc. Manning over this document release? They are both heroes in my eyes. I can't say enough good things about what wikileaks is doing for journalism, It's fun watching them squirm and cry. You end by asking what to do about scandals that are so huge in scope, that reporting them doesn't trigger a public backlash followed by reform. Those are the limits of reformism in general, if a system is too broken or fundamentally corrupt and misguided to be saved. The only thing to do is stop trying to fix a failed system, start looking at alternatives, and view the "massive security shadowland" as the hostile alien entity that it really is. For many many middle-class people of relative privilege, this will involve a radical shift in how they perceive the social order. Time to grow up folks, no more children's fairy-tales about cops fighting "bad guys" and armies "building democracy". Posted by: Jeremy at July 27, 2010 1:36 PM | Permalink This latest Wikileak is yet another nail in the coffin of the cozy media-industrial complex, in which the White House Press Corps cavort around socially with the very people they are supposed to be holding accountable. The mainstream media is mostly a collection of simpering statists, slavishly lapping up whatever their government contacts dish out - protecting the powerful rather than exposing their misdeeds. Just another sign of a Republic in decline. We help Americans move to Asia for jobs and prosperity. Learn more at PathToAsia.com Re: "Whistleblowers can be of either type: calculating advantage-seekers, or men and women with a troubled conscience. We don’t know which type provided the logs to Wikileaks": it doesn't matter...the Bastille is crumbling regardless. We'll see if they try to shut down the internet due to another "crisis" that Rahm Emanuel can make good use of. But at least the Death Star is under attack. ; ) NPR's Marketplace's take on this embargo strategy was that news media will only cover stories that they break. Fair enough (if petty, egotistical and only half the story). http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/07/26/pm-new-media-wikileaks-uses-traditional-media-for-its-afghan-war-diary/ But in light of their story, I couldn't help but think that the dismissive nature of the treatment that WikiLeaks' "Collateral Murder" video received earlier this year was a result of WikiLeaks scooping the establishment media. How central to the narrative, that there was no war crime documented in that video, was the impulse to put the upstart WikiLeaks in its place? No story unless we say so. The story is about a war crime? Therefore no war crime! Posted by: John Mulligan at July 27, 2010 6:25 PM | Permalink 1. If a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it. ((*Bullshit*. Herd journalism is the rule of the land -- and the real story isn't the documents anyways, but how they're interpreted. )) Posted by: Brandon Keim at July 27, 2010 10:24 PM | Permalink Why the lack of strong reactions? I would argue the lack of effective advocacy. Advocacy gets a very bad rap in the world of journalism - the good stuff is cold unbiased fact, and the bad stuff is heated opinion slanted toward a pre-defined outcome. But without a point of view and recommended actions, big shocking news just creates passivity. Facts can help advocacy but do not cause advocacy. Under the Obama administration, there hasn't been as strong and vocal an opposition movement against these wars than under Bush. Posted by: Adina Levin at July 28, 2010 12:16 AM | Permalink Rod Dreher picks up from my no. 8: Why do big revelations fail to bring big reactions? I think many of us -- myself included, certainly -- have, without quite realizing it, given up the expectation that there will be meaningful consequences for great sins, errors and failings. Reading Rosen's bit, the first thing that came to my mind was Wall Street. When all that came crashing down, and we learned about the unbelievable collusion between Wall Street and Washington, I expected that we would have Pecora hearings, and that there would be hell to pay for pols and financiers. Didn't happen. It's not going to happen. I also expected that there would be big consequences for the way we were led into the Iraq War, and for the disaster that has become. Nope. As my longtime readers know, I expected that the revelations of catastrophic mismanagement, corruption and cruelty on the part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, re: the sex abuse scandal, would cause a royal house-cleaning. God, I wish I could figure this out... But I can't. The defenders of the public interest have been cheaply bought. It turns out that the rich and powerful can neutralize academics, journalists, and regulators for chump change. A few tens of thousands in perks and the promise of long-term patronage is all it takes. It took the power elite a few decades to build the necessary cadres of lobbyists, "institutes," and quiet influencers to disable all of America's regulatory safety systems. Now that they have absolute power, we are feeling the consequences of their absolute corruption. Posted by: HH at July 28, 2010 8:47 AM | Permalink Julien Assange spoke in London Tuesday night and confirmed a key point in my post: Another significant reason for choosing newspapers in the US, UK and Germany was to create a multi-jurisdictional publication that would make gagging orders more difficult. This international approach to publishing aptly reflects the somewhat stateless nature of Wikileaks itself, which has no fixed offices or equipment. Media commentator Jay Rosen points out on his blog that next to "location" on Wikileaks' Twitter profile it says "everywhere". According to Rosen, the whistleblowing site is the "world's first stateless news organisation", one interested not in the traditions of fair play in the conduct of news but in "the release of information without regard for national interest". So what should journalism professors be teaching their students now? How to serve the needs of their nation's government, or how to serve the needs of the people of the world? That's an easy question for Bill Keller. Posted by: HH at July 28, 2010 11:16 AM | Permalink Jay, re: point #8, Jane Jacobs's book, Systems of Survival -- have you read it? -- has a very interesting take on this issue, which might be framed more broadly as the question, 'Why, when we know what's wrong in our world, are we so powerless as a people to correct it?' Jacobs's says the problem in not as simple we usually surmise; It's not that we don't have enough information, or that we have too much. It's not that there isn't a consensus (though the degree to which consensus exists is obscured by he said/she said journalism and similar ills you have diagnosed). Instead, she says human culture evolved an interlocking pair of systems of survival -- she calls them the guardian syndrome and the commerce syndrome -- that have broken down because we have lost sight of the need to keep them separate. Our survival depends on us keeping these syndromes distinct from one another, she says, and our current powerlessness stems from our failure in this regard. Institutions that should be acting as guardians have adopted some of the precepts of commerce. Some commercial institutions have become corrosive to society's needs because they have taken on some of the characteristics of guardians. We've developed what she calls "monstrous hybrids" such as HMOs, the military-industrial complex, and the Soviet Union. Most news organizations are splendid examples of the mixture of these syndromes, trying to act as guardians while also having to make a profit. As I recall (been a long time since I read this book), Jacobs allows as how journalism may be an exception. There's more to her argument, but I thought I'd point you to it, since it might be relevant to point #8. The ability of journalist's mental model to successfully bring about reform rests on the ability of those in guardian roles to act as guardians and not cede their responsibilities to commercial interests. It similarly depends on those in commercial roles not undermining guardians by co-opting elements of the guardian's roles. As we have seen, self-regulation doesn't work--not for building inspections in New York City or default credit swaps on Wall Street. If Jacobs is right that our powerlessness to reform systems which produce bad results stems from our failure to keep these ethical syndromes intact and distinct from one another, it might explain why even the best journalism runs aground on its course towards reform. Posted by: John McCrory at July 28, 2010 11:35 AM | Permalink The central evil is the dogmatic, quasi-religious embrace of the Friedmanite market-God ideology. It decrees that everything runs better as a profit-seeking business, and that dollars count for everything and esteem means nothing. The big question is how much more destruction will ensue before this horribly destructive meme is discredited. The adoption of Milton Friedman ideology has consistently let to the rise of gangsterism, crony capitalism, and oligarchy. The US is now getting a full dose of the societal poison we injected into Chile, Argentina, and Iraq. Posted by: HH at July 28, 2010 11:48 AM | Permalink Thanks, John McCrory. That's a really good analysis. I have that book somewhere, so I will consult it. Doc Searls took up no. 8, as well. ...There is no obvious resolution, which is why the air leaks out of the balloon. Wikileaks is what it is: a source. Nothing happening here, move along. FUBAR = "fucked up beyond any repair." And another writer, John Knefel from True Slant, takes on no. 8, as well. Columbia Journalism Review: The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs. A fascinating tale. And, incidentally, confirms what I wrote in this post, especially no. 1. More reaction on no. 8 (it's really getting around now...) This is from a anarchist blog... "We're wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work." What do you mean, we? What do you mean, wasting? What do you mean, does not work? Brad Friedman at Brad Blog, too. Commentary on no. 8. Jay -- Your item #8 is rather American-centric. I doubt that the Taliban will fail to react to the revelation of names and identities of Afghan informants for the US: The names of the traitors to radical Islam will be duly transmitted to the avengers who will then go out severally into the night on their missions of revenge. Recently Radio Netherlands described what Afghans who are suspected by the Taliban can expect to endure. The Taliban have cut off the hands of construction workers who build government-funded projects; sent a suicide car bomb against a district chief believed to have been working with US special forces. Death in many forms will be their lot. One informant Radio Netherlands described “holds a thick yellow sheet tightly around his face” to preserve his anonymity. Now it turns out he shouldn’t have bothered. If the London Times is right, his name might be one of the several hundred the British reporter has found in just a few hours. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at July 28, 2010 11:32 PM | Permalink ROBERT GATES - SEC. OF DEFENSE ALSO LEAKS JUST LIKE BRADLEY MANNING/WIKILEAKS The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.” A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content. ======================= KARL EIKENBERRY LEAKS JUST LIKE BRADLEY MANNING/WIKILEAKS Meanwhile, Mr Eikenberry’s doubts about US strategy and its reliance on Hamid Karzai, Afghan president, were aired in a leaked memo that left Gen McChrystal feeling, in his own words, “betrayed”. But it is Gen McChrystal who has been most at odds with his colleagues – as is seen by the swipes by him and his aides in this week’s Rolling Stone article against everyone from Joe Biden, US vice-president, to Senator John McCain. ================= His position was particularly exposed, precisely because Mr Obama’s strategy, unveiled at a speech at West Point military academy, was ultimately so influenced by the plans Gen McChrystal drew up, which had been leaked in an apparent – and seemingly successful – effort to put pressure on the administration. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-carmichael/memo-to-obama-dismiss-mcc_b_310578.html In his new command, General McChrystal assumed responsibility for a military plan for Afghanistan. In late August, General McChrystal submitted his 66-page confidential report to your Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. Three weeks later, General McChrystal's confidential report leaked to The Washington Post in what some have described as the most egregious leakage of national security documents since the Pentagon Papers. ===================== We didn't vote for or elect any of the above individuals but they all engage/engaged in leaking documents to achieve their own political/institutional agendas. Why is Bradley Manning in trouble if the leadership has failed to demonstrate any adequate judgement relating to confidential documents. At least we got the beef with the Afghan War Logs... The military leadership has lost all discipline and the lack of discipline is stirring up the infantry. Why doesn't MSM criticize the receivers of the above mentioned leaks? The green eye of jealousy emerges because Wikileaks has done something without kissing up to current political/military establishment. MSM is jealous and upset. Kinda like when Microsoft beat Apple... Posted by: Nathan Engleton at July 28, 2010 11:32 PM | Permalink Nice Post! The only thing that troubles me is that "stateless" debate - when I read it in the post I thought: Hmm, that is not quite right. When I read the comments on the Netstate I thought I heard J.P. Barlow echoing from the 1990s. The reason I though that is this: One actually should not confuse a state with that spatial segment that is defined by its borders. Instead stateness is a political activity shaped by techniques of defining a population and land and administrative techniques. Not to have a fixed address and to be able to transfer documents from one hidden place to another is therefore not a sign of statelessness (and not new, by the way: that is what all exile intelligentsia was able to do since the beginning of the century). And both - wikileaks and its forerunners - still address state issues in their campaigns and therefore may play a role in redefining those activities that shape states. That is really enough to accomplish - without also carrying the burden of even building stateless institutions. It's amazing to me how energized people get at proving something is "not new." It's almost like the proposition that there could be something new in the world offends them. But I knew about this before I said those terrible words, "this is new," so I am not complaining. However for the record, Jan, I didn't say statelessness is new, I didn't say that statelesss publishing is new. I said a stateless news organization is new. And so far, despite dozens of criticisms and Tweets telling me I'm cracked, I still think Wikileaks is the first example we have of that. There is nothing new under the sun, in one form or another. A state, defined as a state of existence, is nothing new. Wikileaks could be considered its own state and hence just as corrupt as a territorial nation state. However, since there is no longer a lawless frontier, or at least not one that is mutually recognized or even partly recognized in our totally colonized and jurisdictioned and internationalized world, Wikileaks is at least, if not new, a counterweight to the dominant form of authority, the nation state. But since a bullet can travel across a border and international agreements allow the possibility of one state reaching into another, wikileaks, to the extent that it is composed of physical people who must stand within some state at any given time (unless they are on, over or under the high seas, or visiting antarctica or the moon), must suffer itself to be within a state or a variety of nation states at any given time. An open society will still be required for something like wikileaks to succeed. It may be the fact of US government and military propaganda and actions that threaten to "crack down" (implying god knows what from arrests to assassination) that pushed a panic button on wikileaks to just get the information out there, before they were stopped/jailed/killed. It sounds paternalistic or infantile to suggest that a government can only be challenged if it's a little kind, but that doesn't make it a false assertion. Maybe if the obama administration and the pentagon hadn't been so viciously targeting and intolerant of any leaking and publication, maybe wikileaks would've been in less of a panic mode to save the world and would have spent more time and been less uncritically forthright about the afghan names. So if wikileaks can be blamed for that fault, even aside from the hypocrisy of (plausibly but not necessarily racist) war mongers pretending to give a shit about dark skinned muslim losers they could do without, isn't it also hypocritical not to blame the overbearing, immeasurably more powerful, shadowy government that has already openly declared it will assassinate war suspects, even far from any battlefield, merely because they "might" pose a threat? Just to reiterate my earlier point in propagandistic repetitiousness: There isn't even a substantial DISagreement, it's just about affirming who you are without taking action, and letting the political elites collect their campaign financing and extra-curricular patronage. Posted by: infodealer at July 29, 2010 11:30 AM | Permalink And if you want to comfort yourself by turning the right wing knife around the other way, just as the neocon angle on iran during the green revolution was "we should publicize how america is with the protesters and the protesters are with america, because the regime ALREADY is violent and accuses foreign influence", now liberals can say, "the taliban are ALREADY persecuting the general population as much as they can, so any revenge will be minimally relevant". Cynical, yes. But wasn't the whole situation at least that cynical to begin with? Posted by: infodealer at July 29, 2010 11:37 AM | Permalink And it should be noted, but probably never will, that right wing talk radio talks about wikileaks dismissively because "war is hell, so suck it up". TheY DO NOT proudly broadcast that it's "more fun" to kill muslims with action packed incompetence or that "america should arrest every hippie and dunk their head in the toilet until they drown". If right wing listeners all believed that stuff, you'd think radio would be a chance to broadcast it with reinforcing pleasure. Rather they ignore what wikileaks reveals by rationalization, explaining it away. Democrat politicians, on the other hand, are the ones who simply ignore the revelation and don't even bother to justify their actions. Who REALLY, as gore vidal only says of the right, "LIKES war" and "LIKES money" ? Posted by: infodealer at July 29, 2010 11:46 AM | Permalink Leftwing take on right wingers: war is hell, suck it up Left wingers: the taliban are already persecuting the general populace, etc. Real people in realpeopleland: ZZzzzzz Is it any wonder the public ignores Elite Leftwing Media? Culture war is you, man. You breathe it. Thanks for your contribution. Read and learn. But isn't it obvious to both the left AND the right that the "general public" probably ignore almost everything that the "liberal" AND "right wing" media say? I just don't see how the right isn't bored with fox news by now, just as I can't see why the left isn't bored with calling tea partiers racists. Sure, it's one's own voice being expressed (misguided or not). But who cares to be heard so much when most of us never do anything about our own opinions? For a culture that supposedly always wants distraction and "flash flash" in its infotainment, we sure can concentrate with dedication on a lot of boring monotony. Posted by: infodealer at July 29, 2010 8:14 PM | Permalink Oh please, spare me your moralistic, preening lectures. Who do you think you are---Barack Obama? The culture war and the paranoid style is you man, take a look at these approved comments in this thread: "Nothing offensive to the wealthy and powerful in America can be said without an instantaneous defensive reaction from the Limbaughs, McArdles, and Brooks of the noble journalistic order of Defenders of the Rich...Bill Keller, the crusading editor who delayed the Bush illegal wiretap story long enough for Bush to be re-elected...The defenders of the public interest have been cheaply bought...The central evil is the dogmatic, quasi-religious embrace of the Friedmanite market-God ideology..." What, nothing about Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? I could quote more, but you get my drift. So it seems you approve of The Paranoid Style as long as you agree with the paranoid---those other paranoids, not so much. What a hoot! Posted by: paladin at July 29, 2010 8:28 PM | Permalink Actually, I kind of thought he was talking to me, because most liberals (and more to the point, academics in the humanities and journalists) don't take very kindly to be questioned by a voice that might also be a liberal. They prefer to be criticized by right wingers whom they never meet and never talk to face to face. So I actually DID go and read the paranoid style. And I agree with your dismissal of the article as an ad hominem (despite the fact that I actually like a lot of Harper's issues and have a subscription, without agreeing with everything they say). But it's again just one's perspective. Since the "liberal elite media" doesn't actually attack corruption and corporatism and militarism, I wish someone would just start calling them "democrat elite media". Is an attack on the "power" of the party that actually IS "in power" (as we say of election winners), is that a "paranoid" explanation of the power politics du jour? Wikileaks and Assange want to make a difference among elite politicians. But that smacks of trusting politicians to change, not the people. I mean, I downloaded ALL the articles on sunday, from the 3 newspapers AND all the archive packages from wikileaks. AND I STILL haven't even gotten through most of the 3 newspapers' articles (there aren't really that many). The only thing that I'd accept to call paranoid is that Obama gives lectures. He READS lectures that were written for him and he reads them badly and I'm horrified and ashamed of "my side" for having swooned so ridiculously over his orations. If conservatives feel that someone as dull as Obama is talking over their heads, that just proves that they read even less than the already illiterate liberals. Posted by: infodealer at July 29, 2010 8:54 PM | Permalink Posted by: Neuro-conservative at July 29, 2010 9:51 PM | Permalink to point 8 I might suggest reading this funny, insightful, short book from 1978 - SYSTEMANTICS: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail by John Gall. some of the amazon reviews capture the flavor of it: Posted by: tony k at July 30, 2010 12:45 AM | Permalink Letter I received today about no. 4 above. Hi Jay, Again, use the word "first" or "new" and people take it almost as a personal affront. And they go through all manner of twists and turns to show you how wrong you are. Analyzing this week's efforts on the network nightly newscasts, Tyndall Report concludes that statelessness is what is really freaky about WikiLeaks.org, not Nothing New Here. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 30, 2010 5:19 PM | Permalink Hmm... What's another stateless organization? Posted by: Neuro-conservative at July 30, 2010 9:04 PM | Permalink Jay - I couldn't agree with you more. Point #8 really got me thinking about the role of sensational news in light of public reaction. The Top Secret America story was a major news story that should have caused a massive outcry. I agree that the Wikileaks story could just be glazed over but also represents, in my opinion, the greatest catalyst to change this. It will be interesting to watch it all develop. Thanks for a great article and great insight! Posted by: Republic Monetary Exchange at July 30, 2010 9:20 PM | Permalink |
|
Print
