WikiLeaks or WikiLedes?
[NYT correspondent Mark] MAZZETTI: Well, as a reporter, you're very rarely confronted with this amount of information, and so it's almost - it's the reverse of the situation you're normally in, which is too little information. Here, we are confronted with such a volume of information that it's hard to make sense of it and it's hard to know how to - which parts to emphasize and which parts not to. NPR transcriptIf nothing else, the WikiLeaks exposure should test the claims of journalists and bloggers with regard to the quality of their attention to data.
Journalists still pretend they own the space of creating/reporting news. Bloggers will continue to contend that without intelligent and ethically responsible interpretation of what is reported, the journalistic niche doesn't amount to very much.
An actual journalist would rename WikiLeaks to WikiLedes - because the 92,000 or so documents are so many leads (or ledes) into the complex world of the Afghan war, and this is a relatively small set of documents (the NYT calls it "exhaustive," but probably just means "exhausting").
What Mr. Mazzetti points to as exceptional is in fact the normal case: the actual data out there for any story are potentially infinite. Newsmen deal with digested digests, rarely with the raw. But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not.
Wikileaks exposes the abbreviative power of news media. Faced with something like the complexity of the real, Mr. Mazzetti thought he was dealing with something unusual. He was not. The gap between the NYT accounts of Afghanistan before WikiLeaks, and the density of the documents now available is vast. What Mr. Mazzetti and the NYT are looking at is the abyss that is always there in any bit of actuality, but which their customary defenses have always dealt with deftly and obliviously. They'll need a new set of defenses if the leaks keep coming.
The Times had three weeks or more to examine the documents. Others now have more leisure, and might find more there than the Times did. And pursue different inquiries. On Democracy Now, Julian Assange raises a question about the Pentagon's decision to fire up a criminal investigation into the source(s) of the Wikileaks material:
Why is it that an investigation is announced to go into the source, before an investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct that is revealed by this material? DNWikileaks is lifting two veils: one on the war, the other -- perhaps more significant -- on the unreality of everyday journalism, the fictional, smooth, clear narrative arcs of the Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc.
After cataract surgery, the eyes can be sensitive to light.
Labels: Julian Assange, New York Times, Wikileaks
posted by Tom Matrullo at Wednesday, July 28, 2010
3 Comments:
But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not.
If I were a journalist, I'd say "Ouch !" .. and then I'd get busy.
Thank goodness this WikiLeaks thing came along.
And, I'm so cynical these days that I can't help but feel that somehow big money will find a way to buy the right kinds of sunglasses for everyone.
" What Mr. Mazzetti points to as exceptional is in fact the normal case: the actual data out there for any story are potentially infinite. Newsmen deal with digested digests, rarely with the raw. But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not."
So what major revelations have you seen so far from the WikiLeaks Afghan war logs that haven't so far been covered by the NYT or other international reporting outlets?
The difficulty in training a competent Afghan army?
The tragic killing of civilians during raids?
How the distribution of funds to tribal warlords is creating a shadow government that threatens (or already has) to fill the power vacuum left by the Taliban?
That last piece, by the NYT's Dexter Filkins, was to me, one of the most illuminating pieces on how futile the Afghan war may be. I can't imagine anyone who actually read it would be too shocked by what came out in the Wikileaks load.
That's not to say the Wikileaks release was just old-already-heard-noise. It's big splash helped put more of a spotlight on troubling issues of the war, for people who may not be adept at assembling a good RSS feed of the news.
But to say that what journalists in Afghanistan have been doing has been little more than rehashing "pre-digested regurgiatives" is a bit of a broad generalization. Sure, you can make the argument that the war hasn't been getting as much front-page treatment as it deserves. But to say that all the front-page coverage so far is drek...that's kind of your fault -- if you are someone who actually cares about the war and are an active consumer of news -- for not seeking it out using the easily available channels (i.e. Google).
Dan,
Fair enough - sure there are good journalists who do good stuff well enough even for their hierarchy of editors to not undo, and more pow to them. Are they the norm? Yes, the interested USian may use Google and other engines to burrow through the sludge, but does this give USian journalism a carte blanche to offer us daily doses of cliche while its real attention is on circulation and ad figures?
WikiLeaks may or may not have put out there data that will become the basis of untold stories, I don't know. But what it did do is offer the Times along with the Breitbarts and Becks and Fox "correspondents" and auxiliary sock puppets a scary possibility - that the war could come to USians in ways that commercialized media never imagined, never thought it would have to deal with, because it has assumed for a bit too long that it could rely on bottlenecks of time and space, resources and economies of scale, to solidify its position in a certain economy. One which, as the music industry has discovered, is no longer quite so scarce as it once was.
So those are two things that matter regardless of whether the NYT has journalists of pluck: The alteration in the relation of business customers to access, and the fact that a different order of magnitude has been introduced into the substance of the once-tidy world of commercial journalism. Much as Wikipedia has impacted traditional encyclopedias, and Craiglist has demolished costly classifieds.
One hopes all the Filkinses will benefit from all this. It need not be either/or, but what netlinked computers are capable of is beginning to become clear, and the old houses of mumbo-jumbo, who seem merely frightened by it, as opposed to examining it as a news event in its own right, will open their eyes or fold.
The most exciting part for me is the possibility that augmented access and data will refresh our imagination of, not "the news," but rather of the world the news is supposed to be about. Our complacent assurance that our corporate news institutions are (or ever have been) adequate to the complexity of finance, global environments, ethnic tensions, money relationships among "legitimate" governments and the marauders at their gates, etc. is in some need of rejiggeration.
Post a Comment
<< Home