Posted on 12/07/2010 11:24:26 AM PST by presidio9
The first WikiLeaks moment occurred on Jan. 17, 1998. It was then that Matt Drudge reported that Bill Clinton had had an affair with a White House intern. The story, though, was not Drudge's. It was Michael Isikoff's. His employer, Newsweek, had delayed publication.
Drudge went with it - which is to say that he reported that Newsweek had the story. It took another four days for the so-called mainstream media to catch up. How late! How pitiful!
Now we have The New York Times publishing the cache of documents it received not from WikiLeaks and its contemptible founder, Julian Assange (above), but from The Guardian, a British newspaper.
Assange, it appears, was chagrined by a hard-hitting Times profile of him. But he also might have resented The Times' meddling with the earlier release of about 90,000 military documents. We won't know until WikiLeaks' internal cables are leaked.
What the Clinton scandal and the WikiLeaks disclosures have in common is a collapse of the mainstream press' gatekeeper role.
Newsweek presumably had good reasons to postpone publication of Isikoff's story. The Times had good cause to parse the WikiLeaks cache, but Assange launched them into cyberspace anyway, not caring if American interests were damaged. In fact, that might have been the whole point.
The natural reaction is to want to pop Assange in some way, possibly by indicting him for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 or, in the superheated imaginations of some, by declaring him a terrorist and targeting him for something irrevocable.
The trouble with any of this is that you inevitably get entangled with The Times and other newspapers. They all enabled Assange to reach a wider audience and gave him a journalistic Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval: See, this stuff is important.
The challenge is to keep the cure from doing less damage than the disease. Sure, some world leaders have been discomforted by what has been reported - Saudi King Abdullah should use Yiddish when he wants to speak candidly - but so far as we know, no bodies have hit the floor.
It could be argued that the leaks in any Bob Woodward book are of greater consequence than those served up by WikiLeaks. And when it comes to nihilistic journalism, I refer you to the Rolling Stone magazine story that cost Gen. Stanley McChrystal his command. The article contained nothing of real value concerning policy or a disagreement with President Obama. Yet McChrystal, who survived many a brush with the enemy, was brought down by a shot in the back.
Governments, like married couples, are entitled to secrets - from us, from the neighbors. If everything's open, no one says anything. If you want to know why there is no document detailing when George W. Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, it's because of what Dick Cheney once said: "I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any."
One of the joys of being a journalist used to be knowing what others didn't. No more. Now, everything sees the light of day, and media organizations like Gawker pay for such scoops as pictures allegedly sent by Brett Favre to a young lady of his acquaintance.
The WikiLeaks brouhaha will pass. Diplomats will once again be indiscreet at cocktail parties and rat out one another in the same way some people marry repeatedly, each time forever.
The only thing worse than indiscretion is efforts to punish the miscreants by eroding the core constitutional right to publish all but the most obvious and blatant national security secrets. The government has to get better at keeping secrets.
Muzzle the leakers - but not the press.
After the “Pentagon Papers” the SCOTUS ruled the media can’t be sued even if they print stolen secret documents, even if they stole them.
or somehting like that.
If the Wikileaks guy is going to get punished shouldn’t the NY Times and all the other papers who published his reports be made to pay as well.
I just saw this...
You’re Not Going To Believe This But The Future Of The New York Times (NYT) May Now Actually Be Bright
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-nyt-future-2010-12#ixzz17SJc7GM1
somehow I doubt the NY Times fishwrap future is bright
A Paywall is not going to save them.
It could also be argued that the "leaks in any Bob Woodward book" are creations of the author himself. These comparisons of Assange to the Pentagon Papers, Isikoff/Drudge, and Woodward are preposterous.
Looks to me like the Congress and Obama are pushing for inequality before the law. One standard of free speech for the New York Times and another standard for bloggers. The constitution is dead...while many Freepers cheer with the knee-jerk hang’em mob!
hmmm... is this the same new york times that wouldn’t publish any of the climategate emails?
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