Wikileaks In The Spotlight At The National Conference On Media Reform
Monday, April 18, 2011 at 05:49AM By Erich Vieth [Dangerous Intersection]
I’m in Boston attending the National Conference for Media Reform – 2011, sponsored by Free Press. I’m one of 2,500 would-be reformers on hand, learning a lot about the state of the media, but there’s not enough good news about the news these days. Countless journalists are losing their jobs, newspapers are being shuttered and important stories are thus not getting adequate coverage. On the other hand, the attendees at the conference are, as a group, affable, intelligent and capable people, as are the presenters.
Yesterday I attended a panel discussion on Wikileaks, hosted by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow. I’ll offer some of my observations below, before presenting several videos I shot during the discussions. These videos include of all of the comments by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, who has made Wikileaks a strong focus of his work over the past year. I’ve also included a video of Amy Goodman’s opening comments.
In addition to Glenn Greenwald, the panel included Greg Mitchell, who has created an ongoing and comprehensive Wikiweaks series of posts, in The Nation. Each day’s entry at his blog includes multiple items, and he’s up to at least Day 132. Mitchell has just published an excellent book, The Age of Wikileaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond) (2011); I bought a copy at the conference and I’m halfway through. Mitchell suggested early in the session that the federal government has been treating Bradley Manning inhumanely to discourage future whistle-blowers. Why would that be? Many of the answers are in Mitchell’s own book. For instance, Mitchell reports that prior to the release of the “Collateral Murder” video, Julian Assange predicted:
The video shows what modern warfare has become and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand what is going on. The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even considered.
After reading Mitchell’s account and forcing myself to re-watch the U.S. helicopter attack video, I now realize how little I knew about the U.S. military’s willingness to hide and distort the truth regarding this incident. Until now. It appears that the military destroyed some of the evidence, or at least claimed to have destroyed it, even though one might wonder whether this is true, and wonder whether the Washington Post had a copy of the video during the year prior to Wikileaks’ April 10, 2010 release, but sat on it (see p. 36 of Mitchell’s book).
Panelist Micah Sifry suggested that there is much more to the current phenomenon than Wikileaks itself, which is merely a symptom of a problem. According to Sifry, what we are seeing is a bottom-up trans-national transparency movement. The people formerly known as “the audience” are now putting together the show. Those formerly known as those “in charge” are losing their grip. Further, the Wikileaks phenomenon has demonstrated that the New York Times is “clearly broken.” Sifry alleged, “They have all the cables,” yet they are fumbling with them, evidenced by their failure to use the key word search “kleptocracy,” which would have yielded multiple poignant hits, including cables on Libya. Sifry also offers that Wikileaks has revealed that the United States has two governments: A) the one we elect, and B) the one that runs the government. He commented that the U.S. hostility to Wikileaks reveals the fragility of the Internet. What other conclusion can one draw, he asked, when a phone call from Senator Lieberman convinces Amazon to “kick out Wikileaks,” despite the lack of any criminal wrongdoing by Wikileaks. This is a problem that goes “way beyond net neutrality.”
Australian Christopher Warren agrees that Wikileaks has disclosed a “great fault” in journalism. Whereas the NYT works hard to distinguish itself from Wikileaks, Australian editors joined together to confront their own government’s accusations, arguing that Wikileaks was clearly engaged in journalism. Warren warns: “The American media needs to understand its duty to provide the truth.”
Though I have provided videos below with all of Glenn Greenwald’s comments, I will first highlight a few of his comments.
- The mission of Wikileaks is what journalism is supposed to be about: exposing government secrets; journalists want to maintain “this pretense that this is what they do.” 
- It is already the consensus of the federal government that Wikileaks has committed crimes, but if the U.S. government criminally prosecutes Wikileaks, it would be the first time that someone who is not an employee of the government has been prosecuted for exposing government secrets.
- Why is the American media so hostile toward Wikileaks? Greenwald mentioned “competitive jealousy” and the mindset of American Journalists that they are the “anointed gatekeepers,” but there is a more disturbing reason. The American media has now been exposed as “being deferential to political power, versus being adversarial to political power.” Greenwald mentioned the stunning admission by Bill Keller of the New York Times, that he “runs everything by the Obama administration before publishing.” Apparently the NYT doesn’t understand that it shouldn’t brag about getting “petted on the head for good behavior” by the federal government. Then again, what else would you expect from a paper that held onto the story about George W. Bush’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program for one year, long enough to allow Bush to get re-elected. This is the same paper that did report on Bush’s extraordinary rendition program, but withheld the locations of the facilities “because it would prevent extraordinary rendition.”
Greenwald’s position, one that serves as the moral compass for all of his writings, is that journalism should hold politicians accountable; their allegiance should be to the truth.” Wikileaks is important because secrecy is more than ever the lynchpin of much that our government does. Real journalists know what side to take in the battle between “the government-corporate consortium versus the citizens.” In fact, this struggle between journalists and the U.S. government could accurately be referred to as a “war.”
To conclude this post, I am posting a video of Amy Goodman’s excellent opening remarks, which include detailed commentary on the “Collateral Murder” videotape published by Wikileaks:
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