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In the last two weeks, two stories have made national news that posed challenges for journalists on the national security beat: the Washington Post's blockbuster investigation of the sprawling national security empire that has emerged since 9/11, and Wikileaks' online publication of tens of thousands of internal military documents related to the Afghan War. Taken together, the stories raise important questions about the nature of journalism and the state of public discourse.
For a student of journalism and civic engagement, whole dissertations could be written about what has and hasn't happened as a result of these developments. Principally, I think the lesson is that journalists need to focus not only on the acquisition and presentation of information, but on presenting that information in a way that aids sense-making and empowers citizens to act.
In a way, the revelations in the Post series and the WikiLeaks disclosures raised related questions. Both prompted the public and political leaders to question the effectiveness of the US response to the threat of terrorism. Both engendered a debate about whether the disclosures affected national security.
WikiLeaks: Journalism Game-Changer or Mischief-Maker?
The unorthodox nature of the WikiLeaks operation, including their decision to provide advance copies of the dispatches to three leading traditional news organizations, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian, forced a new conversation among news professionals as well. Tellingly, WikiLeaks' web page refers to the the three newspapers as their "partners," while New York Times executive editor Bill Keller insisted that WikiLeaks was merely a source.
There has been a lot of discussion about the substance, methods, ethics and implications of the Wikileaks disclosures -- especially after news reports that the Taliban is hunting down Afghan informants named in the documents who cooperated with NATO forces. A young serviceman, Pfc. Bradley Manning, thought to be the source of an earlier leak of a military video showing US troops gunning down Afghan civilians and two Reuters journalists, is in custody in Quantico, VA. According to the UK Telegraph, graduate students at MIT are also under investigation in connection with the charges against Manning.
According to this New Yorker profile of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' idiosyncratic founder and center of gravity, the organization rejects consultation with military authorities as a matter of policy, so that particular piece of standard journalistic method of avoiding life-endangering disclosures was not employed. Instead, WikiLeaks follows what Assange describes as a "harm minimization" protocol. In the New Yorker piece, the harm minimization effort involved scrubbing digital identification information from documents, and getting a message to the family of the Afghan civilians gunned down in the earlier video warning them of its impending publication. Beyond that, Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes that it's not always clear what harm minimization means, but it's quite different from what traditional journalists mean when they use anonymous or confidential sources:
"[T]here is a profound difference between how WikiLeaks uses anonymous sources and how the rest of the media does. When the New York Times has a document provided by an anonymous source, its reporter knows the identity of that source. In that case, we expect the reporter to assess both the source's information and the source's reasons for reporting it. When mainstream media outlets are duped by these anonymous sources, we—justifiably—blame them for not checking things out."
This is one reason I disagree with Daniel Ellsberg,
