But How Could Wikileaks Break A Story Without Traditional Newspaper Backing?
from the welcome-to-the-new-world dept
By now you've likely seen the rather horrifying Collateral Murder website, put together from the video leaked to Wikileaks (for which, apparently, US intelligence officials investigated some of the Wikileaks folks). While there's a lot of ongoing back-and-forth over what the video really shows, there's no doubt that the release of the video is a journalistic scoop.And yet, we keep being told that if newspapers fail, no one will be left to do investigative journalism?
So what were the traditional journalists doing to get this story? Rob Hyndman points to a story from a year ago about the mad dash of traditional DC reporters to butter up sources. And what great stories have been broken by the White House Press Corp. over the past year?
There's nothing inherent in newspapers that says that only they can do investigative reporting. As we've seen over and over and over and over again, investigative reporting comes in many forms, and it need not come directly from newspapers.
Perhaps the real question is why the traditional press never set up anything like Wikileaks itself. I guess they're too busy trying to butter up some source in the White House who they hope will feed them a story for political purposes, rather than breaking any real news.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: breaking, investigative, journalism
Companies: wikileaks
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Kudos WikiLeaks!
Perhaps a more basic question is, who is allowed to report. I’ve read stories where entities want to prevent anyone but them from reporting hot news (aka facts). Since when are facts owned by certain entities? It’s no mystery that if allowed, there would be only one source of information: the official source. It would be locked behind a pay wall, and controlled. All this talk about Newspapers being so important is the same thing: corporations looking for a government handout of some kind.
Information is free. Content is a natural phenomena. Of course the argument from some is, how can I own and control content? The answer is only if the government makes it possible: by force.
I can hear the WikiLeaks issue sounding like this: OMG! The Internet is going to destroy America because it is being used to divulge secret information. We have to control it better, for the children’s sake. And so the argument will go.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
LOVELY!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Or, like, ever?
They all share the same hot tub, the power people and their stenographers. WikiLeaks is necessary because of this.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Hmmm...
At this point, the core reason for the middle men to exist - local redistribution is no longer valid and their business models aren't working.
Freedom
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Newspapers gave up on accuracy a long time ago.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Actual news as we think of it comes secondary and is often incidental to the actual process of selling papers. This is because the financial reward is often placed on the highest numbers sold and not something more subjective like "the most accurate reporting".
News that will not further the paper's popularity is discarded, while news that will increase popularity is further sensationalized.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Seriously?
Their location is public. Their identities are public. Feel free to sue them for "defamation" (and lose) at any time.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer_vs._Wikileaks_lawsuit
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Why newspapers do not have setup wiki leaks
To set up something like wiki leaks with all papers together would be nonsense for them, because then everyone would have the same scoop
But each newspaper has its own wiki leaks, since they have all allowed sources to come forward with stories, and the anonymity of these sources is protected as well as they can
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Why newspapers do not have setup wiki leaks
it was a joke BTW
[ link to this | view in thread ]
shootings of Iriqui civilians
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Getting killed.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Why newspapers do not have setup wiki leaks
Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP)
The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)
The Associated Press - world wide news agency, based in New York
Citizen Media Law Project - Harvard university
The E.W Scripps Company - newspapers, TV, cable TV etc.
Gannett Co. Inc - the largest publisher of newspapers in the USA, including USA Today
The Hearst Corporation - media conglomerate which publishes the San Francisco Chronicle
The Los Angeles Times
National Newspaper Association (NNA)
Newspaper Association of America (NAA)
The Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA)
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)
Public Citizen - founded by Ralph Nader together with the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
Jordan McCorkle, the University of Texas
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Whose reporters died in the video????
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Whose reporters died in the video????
So... Actually, I don't understand what you're saying at all. In what was is Reuters responsible for this story? Did they shoot the video, break the encryption, or what? Am I missing something?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Whose reporters died in the video????
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If it was a real news source, it would have NEWS in the title and it would be a .COM, like foxNEWS.COM!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Whose reporters died in the video????
WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Kudos WikiLeaks!
http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Because America is a nation built on fraud ... I mean, laws. It is against the law to expose America's fraudulence.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Iraqi Murders
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Whose reporters died in the video????
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
No they didn't shoot the actual video, because they were DEAD!. Reuters was not successful in getting the video released via FOIA, but I'm sure it was their attempt that caused someone with a conscience at DOD to look at the video and leak it to Wikileaks. I'm not saying Wikileaks isn't providing a valuable service, but to try and say they are doing investigative reporting and Reuters isn't is highly disingenuous.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Do professional journalists do investigative reporting anymore?
Obama is right that Fox isn't a real news organization, but for the wrong reason. If they were a real news organization they wouldn't necessarily drop their right-wing editorial line (back in the day newspapers were identifiably partisan), but they'd have reporters out hunting for all the facts about Obama's life between 1961 and his election that he is assiduously hiding. Of course, by that measure, there aren't any real news organizations.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091229/1044447528.shtml
Apparently, $30,000 worth of equipment was necessary to crack it at the time which would suggest that "supercomputer power" was needed to crack it.
Ironically, on a twitter tweet, Wikileaks said they obtained some video (supposedly it was another video, the video on the Afghanistan shootings that killed 97 people) but they needed (I think the words they used were) "supercomputer power" to crack. Apparently they got their supercomputer power.
I suspect, just like the cell phone industry in the U.S. and everyone else in the U.S., the government didn't bother to go through the trouble of updating their GSM encryption standard to the latest version. Since supercomputer power is needed to crack the very previous release, I suspect that after Wikileaks has learned about this group who has figured out how to crack GSM encryption technology and has learned that supercomputer power is needed to crack it, they figure that there was a lot of information encrypted under this standard that was worth cracking. and so they went out after supercomputer power in order to crack it.
1 + 1 = 2 .
Who do you think helped wikileaks crack this video? Ask yourself a simple question, who is publicly known to have the know how to crack it? The very same group that is known to have cracked it mentioned in the above link (now I'm likely to get them investigated). Either that or Wikileaks found someone else who has cracked it after wikileaks learned from this group that it's crackable.
Serves the government right for not upgrading to the latest encryption standards when they should have.
Then again, I'm not even sure if GSM is used for videos or if the government even used it in this case, these are all just guesses.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
My mistake.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Tell me, what has the NYT suffered for that?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
WikiLeaks
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Robo cop
[ link to this | view in thread ]