Re: <nettime> Steve Coll: Leaks (The New Yorker)

[Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com>]

I think the paradoxes of wikileaks haven't been much discussed. (My apologies if this has already been said here.) The more they dump raw ks is  files at us, the  more , rather than directly studying the files, we rely on the existing media to sift through them for us. Further, of course, we and wikileaks rely on government ( or large institutions of some kind) to produce these files in the first place. Then wikileaks is subject to the randomness or purposefulness of the leakers, who may well be governments themselves. Compared with good and systematic investigative reporting (which we certainly don't have enough of now) wikileaks is far from the best we should aim for. 

Best,
Michael

On Nov 14, 2010, at 5:22 AM, carl guderian wrote:

> 
> On 13-nov-2010, at 10:12, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> 
>> Waiting for Wikileaks to 'disclose and expose' war crimes to start
>> this discussion appears to me to be singularly unhelpful, and
>> that in many respects. Wikileaks simply bridges the gap between
>> what we had every good reasons to believe - and has been quite
>> well documented elsewhere, if not to such an (alas basically
>> indigestible) extent - and what we now know for fact. I don't
>> consider this a giant leap forward.
> 
> I'd say the leaks have been a very big help, though unfortunately not
> in leading to official acknowledgment, let alone dealing with, the
> activities cited therein. What it has done is further document how
> our (meaning US) "best and brightest" news organizations and opinion
> leaders abandoned their responsibiliities before, during and after the
> Iraq war. As they continue to do, in that and in other matters.
> 


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