In July of this year, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin published a series of articles in the Washington Post that were the fruit of a two-year investigation into America’s national security apparatus. In the introduction to the series — called Top Secret America — Priest and Arkin wrote:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
Although the existence of this vast national security state — which in many cases does not even do a very good job of securing important records — has not drawn a lot of attention among Serious Media Commentators, it’s not because no one has written about it. We all know about the Bush administration’s obsession with removing unprecedented numbers of documents and records from public view. But although Barack Obama promised to make government more transparent when he was campaigning — and in the early days of his presidency, he did take some steps in that direction — he soon morphed into a cosmetically more personable version of George W. Bush.
At the same time that one administration massively expanded the infrastructure of the national security state — institutionalizing policies that had only ever been seen before as temporary wartime measures — and that the next administration broke its own promise to pull back from its predecessor’s extreme policies — not just continuing those policies but actually taking them to new levels — what was the traditional media doing? Was it doing its job, which is to uncover what the public has a right to know but the government doesn’t want them to know? Was the media conscientiously and professionally carrying out its responsibilities as the Fourth Estate: an institution outside of, independent of, and not beholden to any established authority other than the authority of the truth-teller?
Obviously, if there is such a need for groups and organizations like these, that question answers itself.
So now we get to the point of all this: Wikileaks. I confess myself to be a little surprised at the number of progressives and liberals who think that what Wikileaks does — and in particular what it just did — is shameful, disgraceful, and reprehensible. Needless to say, I feel differently.
Wikileaks was founded in 2007. Not in 1967 or even 1997 — in 2007. After everything I’ve written above, surely it doesn’t require much thinking to understand why an organization like Wikileaks would come into existence around or about that time. If you are inclined to think about these things in supply and demand terms, then Wikileaks is simply responding to a demand that everyone else has ignored. If the media was doing its job, Wikileaks wouldn’t be needed, and indeed it wouldn’t exist. When you start looking around, and see that most major news organizations define “informing the public” about Wikileaks as giving them FAQs about why Wikileaks is doing these terrible things and what Our Leaders can do to stop them, it’s like a flashing red neon sign with arrows pointing back toward the news organizations screaming, “See? THIS is why Wikileaks exists!”
I mean, how pathetic is it that the Washington Post publishes an article chortling about how Wikileaks “spurned” the New York Times by not giving it exclusive first access to “a massive cache of government documents” that if the supposed “newspaper of record” were doing its job it would have been trying to get for itself? How appalling is it that the closest thing this country has to a national newspaper relies on Wikileaks to do the work it should be doing for itself? How laughable is it when the Times feels compelled to published “A Note to Readers,” elaborately and carefully explaining why it’s publishing documents that reveal to Americans the chasm between what our government tells us or persuades us to believe about our country’s foreign policy and what is really going on? Did I say “explain”? Perhaps “apologize” would be a better word for dreck like this:
Providing an Analysis
Of course, most of these documents will be made public regardless of what The Times decides. WikiLeaks has shared the entire archive of secret cables with at least four European publications, has promised country-specific documents to many other news outlets, and has said it plans to ultimately post its trove online. For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public.
But the more important reason to publish these articles is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations — and, in some cases, duplicity — of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.
We’re only “providing an analysis”! If we didn’t publish these cables, other papers would! In fact, other papers already have! We’re just reporting on what other papers have reported about a quarter of a million American foreign policy communications that Wikileaks — NOT US! — obtained!
Andy Greenberg at Forbes has an interview with Julian Assange, and a feature article on the “coming age of leaks,” here. A lengthy profile by Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker is here. Simon Jenkins at The Guardian writes that it’s not the media’s job to “protect the powerful from embarrassment.”
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