If the latest revelations are to impact the campaign it will be all Laurie Oakes’ fault. That’s the thing about a leaker — they’re pretty powerless without a good leakee.
Somebody has to join the dots. To ask the questions. To provide the context.
The latest WikiLeaks project is partly remarkable for the fact that this time Assange and co have teamed up with The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel in releasing the Afghanistan war logs. This is a marked departure from Wikileaks’ release of the footage of an Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians earlier this year.
As The Guardian‘s Dan Kennedy writes today:
“In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers — the US government’s own secret history of the Vietnam war — to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.”
You need both the Ellsbergs and the Bradlees to bring information to light. Dumping some 92,000 documents online does not necessarily serve the public interest in itself — somebody has to make sense of it all. This time, WikiLeaks asked for some help. From journalists, no less.
Oakes and co will never go out of style.
This editorial was perhaps trying hard to imply something about the comparison between Oakes’ leak and the Wikileaks story, but you should have gone further. The Oakes story is a lamentable aspect of politics: we do not know if the leak is either correct (we have to take Oakes’ interpretation), or the leakee is correct; contrary to all the claims and punditry we do not know if this is not some elaborate dirty smear from a Liberal or associate (who knows, even inside Labour or Rudd staff). And at bottom, it is NOT an important story like the media are trying hard to beat up this morning.
Gillard dismissed it all this morning and the thing will or should be dead by tomorrow, but I for one am not going to forget Oakes shabby role in this. This is not in the public interest. And Oakes should retire because I reckon he has shot himself in the foot.
Key difference here. Wikileaks publish the material and allow the public to draw their own conclusions. Laurie Oakes publishes a story without any evidence. Now assuming cabinet meetings are minuted and/or taped – and they were leaked – then we would have evidence!
I was interested in the general argument here that leaked – or accidentally divulged, e.g. in Senate enquiry testimony or in indiscreet media conferences, government information needs a high-level journalistic input to give it context and ‘news weight”.
Coincidentally, I was on an Independent Scholars panel at Mitchell Library NSW last Saturday discussing the theme ”History, Memory, and Truth”. I gave three examples of where leaked or accidentally disclosed sensitive information got out in the public arena, but there were no weighty established journalists interested in picking it up and running with it. My three were the 2001 sinking of SIEV X and the people smuggling disruption program; and the real significance for ADF rules of engagement and chain of command protocol of the 2001 children overboard affair, and in 2003 the secret commencement of Australian combat operations in Iraq 30 hours before the expiry of a 48 hour coalition ultimatum to Saddam, and 22 hours before our allies began combat. In all three casees, red-hot news information was out there, waiting for top journalists to weigh in with context and follow-up. None did.
The media chooses its own stories. Some, it just doesn’t choose to pursue.
Listening to Julian Assange on TEDtalks it is clear that his organisation was limited by the volume of material which created a bottleneck at Wikileaks and the fact that Wikileaks has a rigorous selection process for its journalists that have to deal with State Secrets, analyse and report on them. Their use of external media was not necessarily an act of faith in the conventional media.
I don’t know that our Journo’s should start patting themselves on the back saying they are still necessary. Mostly they seem preoccupied with trotting behind the pollies reporting verbatim what is said to them.
Absolutely right Tony. And now we are kicking around refugees again they ignore the law even though it is sent to them time and again.
Like the tedious little fact of contiguous zones, the inalienable right to seek asylum here, the fact that it can only be done here and tiny things.
Like the failure of all of the morons to connect the dots to the Afghan war and Afghan refugees illegally locked up here.
They are the worst media I have ever come across – and most of them suffer amnesia from great historical things like 2001 and the kids not thrown.