and one last thing..we talked yesterday about a Physics blog that I thought excellent, well here it is:
arXiv blog
Interstellar Travel Not Possible Before 2200AD, Suggests Study
A new estimate of the amount of energy needed to visit the stars suggests we won't have enough for at least another two centuries
kfc 01/07/2011
* 13 Comments
How soon could humanity launch a mission to the stars? That's the question considered today by Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project and founder of the Tau Zero Foundation which supports the science of interstellar travel.
This is a question of increasing importance given the rate at which astronomers are finding new planets around other stars. Many believe that it's only a matter of time before we find an Earth analogue. And when we do find a place with the potential to host life like ours, there is likely to be significant debate about the possibility of a visit.
The big problem, of course, is distance. In the past, scientists have studied various factors that limit our ability to traverse the required lightyears. One is the speed necessary to travel that far, another is the cost of such a trip.
By looking at the rate at which our top speed and financial clout are increasing, and then extrapolating into the future, it's possible to predict when such missions might be possible. The depressing answer in every study so far is that interstellar travel is centuries away.
Today, Millis takes a different approach. He looks at the energy budget of interstellar missions. By looking at the rate at which humanity is increasing the energy it has available and extrapolating into the future, Millis is able to estimate when we will have enough to get to the stars.
To make his extrapolation, Millis looked at the amount of energy the US has used to launch the shuttle over the last thirty years or so, as a fraction of the total energy available to the country. He assumes that a similar fraction will be available for interstellar flight in future. He then calculates how much energy two different types of mission will consume.
The first mission is a human colony of 500 people on a one-way journey into the void. He assumes that such a mission requires 50 tones per human occupant and that each person will use about 1000W, equal to the average amount used by people in the US in 2007.
From this, he estimates that the ship would need some 10^18 Joules for rocket propulsion. That compares to a shuttle launch energy of about 10^13 Joules
The second mission is an unmanned probe designed to reach Alpha Centauri, just over 4 light years away, in 71 years. Such a ship would be some three orders of magnitude less massive than a colony ship so it's easy to imagine that it would require less energy.
But Millis places another constraint on this mission. Not only must it accelerate towards its destination, it must decelerate when it gets there (although why this isn't a requirement for a colony ship isn't clear).
That changes the the numbers significantly. Millis estimates that the probe would require some 10^19 Joules.
The final step in is to determine when humanity will have this kind of energy available for these kinds of missions. By extrapolation, Millis calculates that the required energy will not be available until at least the year 2196. "This study found that the first interstellar mission does not appear possible for another 2 centuries centuries," he says.
That's necessarily a crude calculation but a sobering one nonetheless. It implies that while we will soon be able to gaze with wonder upon other Earths, it will not be possible to visit them within the lifetime of anybody alive today.
In other words, for the foreseeable future, we're trapped.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066: Energy, Incessant Obsolescence And The First Interstellar Missions
Trips 'n' Travels Amateur Astronomers Usher In New Era Of Discovery, Says Report
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Torbjorn_Larsson_OM
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 95 Comments
Not trapped, already started
If instead the technology is to colonize our Oort cloud and then the next, we have already started by taking trips out in space.
Such a colonization is AFAIU in principle feasible with today's technology since I've seen claims that the amount of fissionable material in comets will suffice. No need to develop fusion (but it would be a boon), enough hydrogen rich material to protect from radiation and small impactors, and no need for fancy drives. What remains is to show feasibility of inhabiting comets at low gravity and, likely, enough closure of small biospheres (as today's record is a mere 70 % which may be too wasteful).
Unless someone points out a show stopper, we are likely already on our way.
Such a colonizing front would eventually cover the whole galaxy in a reasonable amount of time. If anybody cares, it isn't as if there would be much interest in communication beyond on local environment and techniques. And eventually divergent evolution with speciation would make the common cultural and biological base of little importance. C'est la vie.
Reply
heldervelez
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 5 Comments
how to survive to the next glaciation ?
Life on Earth is not a miracle. It is a 100% probable event.
Then an EarthLike planet must be full of Life.
The 'terraforming ' science must evolve.
Biology must evolve.
The author is short-sighted because it sees only in accordance with current conditions: 'moving adults'.
But nothing prevents us from moving frozen embryos to be developed and educated in the future.
So, instead of displacing 500 people,
We could move thousands/millions of people TO BE BORN and educated in the future, near the target, progressively, without a vivid memory of a 'Lost Eden'.
Some educators must deeply sleep until needed in each journey.
And we must move forward, without delay, because, as we soon will aknowledge, the Earth is in a process of Constant Global Cooling. (*)
We will be subjected to further glaciations, and shortage of energy.
(*) It exists a paper to be, that will turn this issue unquestionable, following this one:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0208365
A relativistic time variation of matter/space fits both local and cosmic data
--
And the sun is not dead, quite the opposite, and occasionally gives a sneeze. Oh, we still do not know this, we think it is quite so calm. I'm sorry.
Reply
rarnold
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 4 Comments
Technology and Step Functions
The development of technology and its impact on available energy density has not followed any linear progression in the past, but rather has increased non linearly. Why does the study presume via linear extrapolation otherwise?
Reply
gerardomarina
* 2 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 8 Comments
Re: Technology and Step Functions
maybe i'm not correct but will venture to say is log normal base 10 -> 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 transforms into 10, 100, 1000 right?
Reply
UncleAl
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 170 Comments
Nonlinear in energy
Spaceflight is change in momentum (p = mv) but thrust is E = (mv^2)/2. Project vs. energy is not as depicted in the log charts. The slope is much steeper for fast traverse. Modified charts are then eloquent: Humanity remains mudfeet barring a drastic alteration of physics.
Reaction mass was ignored. A self-contained vessel cannot be both fast (mv) and efficient ((mv^2)/2). It requires both outrageous amounts of reaction mass and huge contained energy. Matter-antimatter annihalation is optimistic by at least a factor of two: hadron-antihadron annihalation (99.97% of atomic mass is nuclear) loses 50% of its E = mc^2 as neutrinos that provide no directional thrust.
An open cycle craft (e.g., Bussard ramjet) is no better than marginal even if the technology existed. Traveling at 10% of lightspeed and hitting a 1 microgram interstellar grain is a world of hurt: 215 grams of TNT detonating in a 0.001 mm^3 volume.
Physics seeks to quantize all interactions. The appropriate force-mediating vector boson here is the fundon, the quantum of grant funding. The fundon is promoted out of the vacuum with money. Theory is always prefered to experiment because virtual mud always packs tighter than real gems.
Reply
mark1qhorsey
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 2 Comments
Re: Nonlinear in energy
Any inter-steller mission must by default gather its source of propulsion energy 'along the way'. One consideration is to 'extract' mass, as well as gravity-well energy from objects in the Oort cloud and to then collect the mass for conversion into reaction mass. With this notion (which is implicit in previous comments) mapping the Oort cloud for suitable 'fuel mining' objects - both massive and offering gravity wells - would be a nice step. Also, all impinging mass - micro-meteorites - are potential fuel if captured without damage (i.e., in a giant foam farm?). It's a wonderful challenge!
Reply
mark1qhorsey
* 3 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 2 Comments
Re: Nonlinear in energy
Two additional thoughts - I reference M. Xu et al., Science 330:1364 (2010) for a candidate early technology 'viscoelastic foam., and of course, graphene/carbon nanotube structures that may be able to store electrical energy in tremendous amounts necessary to provide for mass conversion to reaction mass.
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gdnordley
* 2 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 1 Comment
Re: Nonlinear in energy
Human interstellar travel will take a lot of energy. I usually think in terms of a thousand-ton starship moving at a gamma of two (useful time dilation, nice round number). The relativistic expression is E = m c^2 (gamma - 1), which gives us about 1E23 J. The most obvious source for this amount of energy is space based Solar. As it far exceeds the needs of even a rather profligate Terrestrial population, I think the energy source would need to be built specifically for interstellar flight, so the past history of energy expansion is probably not relevant. Imagine someone in 1880 trying to predict the amount of automobile use in 2000 based on the historical rate of road paving, or oil production, extant at the time.
For star travel, key technology could be the ability of robotic manufacturing technology to turn asteroid material into copies of itself and solar power stations. As an oversimplified example, suppose one can build a factory that copies itself and makes a 1GW solar power station every year. This would not be a huge feat of artificial intelligence; I think the smarts of a honeybee would do the trick. Some in-situ resource acquisition and use technology would need to be invented or improve on. But the replication rate may even be conservative. Robots don't sleep and you don't need heavy equipment to move stuff in space. Given that scenario, the total energy collected in one year would reach 1E24 Joules in 26 years. Allowing a ten year development program, a starship could be launched in about 36 years from the word go.
It is part of the art of comparative mission studies to shape the final conclusion by careful selection of the study groundrules. Serious and honest investigators check their conclusions for their sensitivity to assumptions. For instance, in the above, if the multiplier is 1.5 factories/stations per year, it takes 44 years to reach 1E24 J. If it is 2.5, the time is 20 years. I like the latter idea because, it isn't impossible that those of my generation will often be alert and reasonably functional in their 90's. I might live to see the launch.
When projecting decades into the future, one has to apply a bit of "Kentucky windage" to the technology base. While that involves some intellectual risk taking, we know that projections made on the basis of existing technology limitations and practices will certainly be wrong. In the case of interstellar travel, we should at least anticipate inevitable advances in robotics, ultrastrong materials such as graphene, and superconductors, then factor these into designs for radiation protection, sails, in-situ resource use, life support systems, etc... Magnetic sails, for instance, would be most useful in slowing down from relativistic velocities, which is one reason not to be too bothered by deceleration energy. People are not going to the stars in the starships we could build today with the energy infrastructure on planet Earth.
Gerald Nordley-7 Jan 2011
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smoker
* 2 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 14 Comments
Rubbish
If we accelerate at 1G then we would be travelling at an appreciable fraction of light speed before we left the solar system. Io and Titan contain all the fuel we need for inter-stellar flight.
There are many many people who would be glad to take a one way trip.
What's the problem ?
Destination.
No one wants to go on a meaningless one way trip.
But given a viable planet, there is no holding back. I would go just for the trip, £$%^ the planet !
Ignorant people causing parochial policies.
If this had been the aim from the start of the space age, then we would be nearly there by now !
(unfortunately, it would be another xx years before we found out if they had made it !)
Imagine the news on the day that we received a message from another star system... and the signal was human. I would be happy to die knowing we had actually made it,and the door was now open.
There is no try ...
pps. Why can't the publisher of this web site spot spelling mistakes and blatant grammatical errors ?
"He assumes that such a mission requires 50 tones per human occupant ..."
Is that a metric "tone"?
Reply
intuition
* 2 Days Ago
* 01/07/2011
* 11 Comments
Push V. Pull
Rather than pushing with thrust is it possible to pull a craft towards a source?
Reply
rbrtwjohnson
* 2 Days Ago
* 01/08/2011
* 8 Comments
Interstellar spacedrives
I think space colonization, in a foreseeable future, will depend on development of energy-efficient spacedrives.
Reply
intuition
* Today
* 01/09/2011
* 11 Comments
Re: Interstellar spacedrives
Agreed, but would not the most efficient drive be one which directs energy already contained within space?
Reply
rbrtwjohnson
* Today
* 01/09/2011
* 8 Comments
Re: Interstellar spacedrives
I think we need to learn more how to harness energy already contained within space.
Do you know some technology already available that can do that?
Reply
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The Physics arXiv Blog produces daily coverage of the best new ideas from an online forum called the Physics arXiv on which scientists post early versions of their latest ideas. Contact me at KentuckyFC @ arxivblog.com
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This is long but for the record from Vanity Fair a very good look at the relationship between Wikileaks and some of the great, good old news papers and especially the 200 year old Guardian:
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.
By Sarah Ellison•
Photograph by Ki Price
February 2011
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, at a news conference in London last October. The partnership forged with The Guardian leveraged Assange and his Web site into a global story. But the relationship was never an easy one.
On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. The encounter was one among many twists and turns in the collaboration between WikiLeaks—a four-year-old nonprofit that accepts anonymous submissions of previously secret material and publishes them on its Web site—and some of the world’s most respected newspapers. The collaboration was unprecedented, and brought global attention to a cache of confidential documents—embarrassing when not disturbing—about American military and diplomatic activity around the world. But the partnership was also troubled from the start.
In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.
The Guardian partnership was the first of its kind between a mainstream media organization and WikiLeaks. The future of such collaborations remains very much in doubt. WikiLeaks, torn by staff defections, technical problems, and a crippling shortage of money, has been both battered and rejuvenated by the events of the past several months. A number of companies—PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard—stopped acting as conduits for donations, even as international publicity has attracted high-profile supporters and many new donors. Kristinn Hrafnsson, a close associate of Assange’s and a WikiLeaks spokesman, promises that WikiLeaks will pursue legal action against the companies. Although it is not known where the instigation came from, hackers launched a wave of sympathy attacks on PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard operations, and temporarily shut them down. Assange himself, arrested in December on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in a sexual-assault investigation, spent time in a British prison before being granted release on bail. At press time, he awaits a decision on extradition and, in the meantime, must wear an electronic anklet, must check in with authorities daily, and must abide by a curfew. Some are pressing the U.S. government to take action against him under the Espionage Act or some other statute. Whatever the fate of WikiLeaks itself, the nature of the Internet guarantees that others will continue to step into its shoes. “The WikiLeaks concept will bring about other organizations and I wish them well,” Hrafnsson says, even as he insists that WikiLeaks is “functioning fully” without Assange.
The Guardian wasn’t the only newspaper to work with WikiLeaks. To assist in publishing the first two batches of documents—on the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq—WikiLeaks brought in two other parties, The New York Times and the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Eventually the group was expanded to include television: CNN, Al Jazeera, and Britain’s Channel 4. For the third batch of documents—the diplomatic cables—WikiLeaks worked with five print publications in a collaboration that was marked by serial delays and considerable mistrust on all sides. (“Everyone’s a cheat,” laments one editor involved in the project, looking back.) But The Guardian was the lead organization from the outset: it came up with the idea of a collaboration with WikiLeaks, and it made the arrangement work. That central role may seem odd to some. The Guardian is relatively small—it’s merely the 10th-largest national newspaper in Britain (behind The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph, and ahead of only The Independent). But it is aggressive and relentless, and performs on a global stage in a way that most bigger British newspapers simply do not.
The paper has come a long way from the old Manchester Guardian, which, as a former editor, Peter Preston, remembers, was read by “a bluff, Presbyterian, gum-boot-wearing do-gooder.” There are still many of those, but they’re reading alongside a younger, internationally minded audience attracted by The Guardian’s left-leaning politics and its influential Web site, which vies for the largest audience of any news site in Britain. And it’s not just Britain: two-thirds of the guardian.co.uk’s readers live elsewhere. Even before WikiLeaks, the paper was running attention-getting stories on subjects ranging from the Pentagon to Rupert Murdoch to British Aerospace.
The partnership between The Guardian and WikiLeaks brought together two desperately ambitious organizations that happen to be diametric opposites in their approach to reporting the news. One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards, joined up with one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers, with no standards at all except fealty to an ideal of “transparency”—that is, dumping raw material into the public square for people to pick over as they will. It is very likely that neither Alan Rusbridger nor Julian Assange fully understood the nature of the other’s organization when they joined forces. The Guardian, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones—too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace. Assange would come to see the mainstream media as a tool to be used and discarded, and at all times treated with suspicion. Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years. While the leaks haven’t produced a single standout headline that rises above the rest—perhaps because the avalanche of headlines has simply been overwhelming—the texture, context, and detail of the WikiLeaks stories have changed the way people think about how the world is run. Many comparisons have been made between the leak of these documents and Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. By today’s standards, Ellsberg’s actions look quaint: one man handed files to one news organization. The WikiLeaks documents are as revealing as the Pentagon Papers, but their quantity and range are incomparably greater. And they speak even more powerfully to the issue of secrecy itself. The collaboration of newspaper and Web site was never a marriage—more an arrangement driven by expedience, and a rocky one at that—but it will forever change the relationship between whistle-blowers and the media on which they rely.
Alan Rusbridger, 57, is quiet, rumpled, and understated. His sphinx-like demeanor belies the grab-your-lapel impact of the stories he publishes. An accomplished pianist, Rusbridger is writing a book about learning to play Chopin’s First Ballade. (He has also written several children’s books and a history of the evolution of sex manuals.) Sitting in the glass-walled conference room in The Guardian’s new headquarters, near King’s Cross station, in North London, Rusbridger gathers the staff each morning at 10 to go over the previous day’s edition and discuss what lies ahead. Unlike at almost any other paper, the news “conference” is open to anyone on staff, a democratic gesture that occasionally makes for heated conversation, though mostly the underlings stay quiet. When I attended such a conference, the week of the release of the Iraq War Logs, in late October, Rusbridger spoke so softly that I could barely hear him. One by one he called on his editors to report. “Sport,” he intoned, barely audible. The sports editor said his piece. “Comment,” Rusbridger said, again barely audible. The opinion editor gave a report. The meeting continued along these lines for 15 minutes. Then it was over, and everyone got back to work.
The Guardian came to life in the aftermath of the so-called Peterloo Massacre, in 1819. At least 11 people were killed and hundreds more injured when the local Manchester cavalry attempted to quell an unarmed crowd of demonstrators. John Edward Taylor, a young businessman, saw the violence firsthand and wrote an account that he sent to London by the night train. It was published two days later in the Manchester Gazette. His report, which contradicted the official version, made a big splash. Taylor started the Manchester Guardian two years later.
Rusbridger told the story of Taylor and the Peterloo Massacre at a gathering last fall as he introduced a panel of three of his reporters to a group of readers in a public hall on the ground floor of The Guardian’s offices. He drew a comparison between Taylor’s coverage and the work of a 29-year-old Guardian reporter, Paul Lewis, who had investigated the death of Ian Tomlinson, a newsstand operator killed in 2009 during a demonstration in London. Lewis’s reporting, which showed that Tomlinson had been struck by a police officer and knocked to the ground, contradicted claims by the authorities that he had died of a heart attack. Every Guardian editor—there have been only 11 in 190 years—has been keenly aware of the newspaper’s heritage. The power of that legacy is acknowledged in the one official bit of instruction given to each new editor, which is simply to continue on “as heretofore.”
Taylor gave The Guardian its start, but his nephew, Charles Prestwich Scott, would become the newspaper’s best-known and most influential editor. Scott took over in 1872—he was in his mid-20s—and eventually bought the paper outright. He remained at the helm for 57 years. Scott outlined the paper’s principles in a centenary editorial on May 5, 1921, in which he put forth what has become the paper’s motto: “Comment is free, but the facts are sacred.” A bust of Scott surveys the lobby of the Guardian offices.
In 1936 the Scott family created the Scott Trust and folded the newspaper into it. The arrangement was unusual—and one that some newspapers today are looking to as a model. In essence, the trust owns profitmaking businesses that generate money to subsidize the paper, should it need the support. In 1959 the Manchester Guardian dropped the birthplace from its name, and five years later The Guardian moved to London.
Because the paper was initially published in the Midlands, the early editions in London were often filled with typos. The satirical magazine Private Eye referred to the paper as “The Grauniad,” and the nickname has stuck. But to this day it remains the only British daily newspaper that runs a regular corrections column. Twelve years ago, Rusbridger appointed an ombudsman—common in the United States, but the first ever in Britain.
There is a whiff of self-importance about The Guardian that critics don’t fail to notice. But it’s also true that the newspaper has broken more big stories in recent years than any of its rivals. The Guardian has been sued for libel so many times that Rusbridger can’t immediately recall them all. Soon after Rusbridger became editor, in 1995, Jonathan Aitken, a prominent Tory M.P. who had been the subject of a Guardian investigation into his dealings with Saudi arms brokers, brought suit against the paper. In the course of a vicious legal battle he committed perjury and was sentenced to an 18-month prison sentence. (Aitken wrote a book about the episode, called Pride and Perjury. David Leigh, who was deeply involved in the paper’s coverage of Aitken and is now the Guardian’s investigations editor, wrote a book of his own, called The Liar.) Other high-profile libel actions came from the Police Federation; Matthias Rath, who encouraged aids patients in South Africa to replace their regular drugs with his unproven vitamin treatment; and Keith Schellenberg, who objected to being depicted as a multi-millionaire playboy who had turned a Scottish island into a sybaritic playground. One of the few suits the newspaper has settled is the action brought by the supermarket chain Tesco. A Guardian story, two years ago, about the company’s complex tax dealings was in fact incorrect, and the newspaper published two apologies and paid an undisclosed sum to a charity of Tesco’s choice. In the aftermath, rather than shy away from the subject of tax avoidance by big corporations, the newspaper redoubled its efforts, publishing an investigative series on the subject, “The Tax Gap,” that ran every day for two weeks.
In March of 2008, The Guardian’s Nick Davies got a tip that the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, was being sued by Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, for using a private investigator to hack into his voice mail. Davies followed up, and after more than a year of collecting data, two explosive articles appeared on The Guardian’s front page. One of them, “How News of the World Journalists Broke the Law,” maintained that some of Murdoch’s reporters had been “involved with private investigators who engaged in illegal phone-hacking.” (Among the hundreds whose voice mails were hacked: Prince William and Prince Harry.) The other article alleged that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had paid out more than a million pounds “to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.” The two articles, and many more that followed, spurred a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing, multiple lawsuits by alleged victims of phone hacking, and a battle of sorts between The Guardian and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
As The Guardian’s coverage unfolded, Rusbridger ran into Rupert Murdoch’s son James, who runs the Murdoch newspapers in Britain. “Your reporting on our company has been very hostile for a long time,” Murdoch said coolly. Rusbridger smiles almost imperceptibly as he recalls the incident.
But nothing in The Guardian’s recent record has had quite the ambition or impact of the WikiLeaks effort. The origins of the collaboration between WikiLeaks and its “media partners” date back to June 2010, when Nick Davies read a four-paragraph story in his own paper about the arrest of Private First Class Bradley Manning, an American soldier who had allegedly passed along hundreds of thousands of classified military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Davies resolved to find Assange.
Julian Assange is a 39-year-old native of Melbourne who started out his professional life as a computer hacker. He affects a smilingly helpless air and until his arrest was notoriously elusive, sleeping on the floors and couches of sympathizers and never staying long in any one place. He kept odd hours, often working through the night and then sleeping until late into the day. His only faithful companion had been a laptop. Iain Overton, editor of the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Reporting, who worked with Assange on the Iraq War Logs, says he has only seen him in one of two outfits, a dark suit for press conferences or, when he’s not onstage, a gray pullover and leather jacket. “He is not a man who looks like he’s greedy,” Overton says.
The WikiLeaks site itself was partly hosted on a server in Sweden that is lodged in a former nuclear bunker drilled deep inside the White Mountains. A few months before the Manning story broke, Assange had released through WikiLeaks the video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly firing on a group of men who included a Reuters photographer and his driver, and then firing on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded. (Twelve people were killed in the incident.) The video, which Assange titled “Collateral Murder,” became a viral sensation. In January, before the release of “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks had shut down temporarily due to a reported lack of funds. Assange made a plea for new donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages of documents relating to “corrupt banks, the U.S. detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the U.N,” and many other topics, but lacked the resources to release them. “Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and $1000, a million,” Assange wrote. As a result of the funding drive, says Kristinn Hrafnsson, by early 2010 WikiLeaks had accumulated roughly $1 million in its accounts, collected mainly by a German foundation. (The foundation, Wau Holland, is expected to release a report shortly on salaries and spending at WikiLeaks.) At the time of his meeting with Davies, Assange had repeatedly voiced frustration that his leaks hadn’t received the attention they deserved. The Guardian’s Rusbridger recently looked back through old e-mails from Assange, from a period when Assange was trying to get more notice. “In many ways, he was right,” Rusbridger says. “People weren’t paying attention.”
With “Collateral Murder,” Assange wanted to change that. He presented it first at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., then followed with an appearance on The Colbert Report, wearing a crisp white shirt and with his thin blond hair slicked back. The audience seemed to love him.
Davies started contacting anyone he thought might be able to put him in touch with Assange. “Eventually I got a phone call from one of the people who was close to Julian saying, ‘Don’t tell Julian I’m telling you this, but he’s about to fly into Brussels to give a press conference to the European Parliament.’ ” Ian Traynor, The Guardian’s European editor in Brussels, buttonholed Assange at the Parliament building and learned that WikiLeaks was looking to release two million pages of confidential documents. Davies rushed to Brussels. The next day, he and Traynor went to the Hotel Leopold, woke up Assange, and began a conversation that lasted for the next six hours.
“All I know really is what’s in the public domain,” Davies says he told Assange, “which suggests that you’ve got a very exciting bag of secrets.” Assange replied, in his slow baritone, “I have a record of every single episode involving the U.S. military in Afghanistan for the last seven years.” Davies said, “Holy moly!” Indeed, Assange went on, he had more than that: “I have a record of every single episode involving the U.S. military in Iraq since March 2003.” Assange also made reference to a third cache of documents—diplomatic cables—and to a fourth cache, containing the personal files of all prisoners who had been held at Guantánamo.
Davies made the case to Assange that the documents would effectively evaporate if they were put up as raw data on the Web—no one could make sense of so much material. Both he and Assange agreed that the Times would be a good, and protective, addition to the project. It is unlikely that U.K. courts could block publication, but it’s even more unlikely that the U.S. government would go after The New York Times, given the strong First Amendment protections and the precedent set by the Pentagon Papers case.
The two laid plans to set up a research bunker in The Guardian’s offices. They agreed that they wouldn’t talk about the project on cell phones. They agreed that, in two days, Assange would send Davies an e-mail with the address of a Web site that hadn’t previously existed, and that would exist for only an hour or two. Assange took a paper napkin with the hotel’s name and logo and circled various words. At the top he wrote, “no spaces.” By linking the words together, Davies had his password.
Davies headed back to London the next morning to consult with Rusbridger. They had two worries. First, would the material be any good? “When I had looked at little bits on his laptop, it struck me as being deeply insignificant, fragments of nothing,” Davies remembers. The other worry was that there could be material in the files that the newspaper wouldn’t want to publish, because it might hurt people on the ground.
They would know soon enough: the password released the entire WikiLeaks database on Afghanistan into their hands. Rusbridger called Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who sent Eric Schmitt, one of his most seasoned military correspondents, to London to see what was on offer. “He reported back that the material was clearly genuine, that it was quite interesting, and that it came with no strings attached,” Keller recalls, “except an embargo: the news organizations would not publish until WikiLeaks was ready to post the documents.”
Soon after, Assange brought Der Spiegel into the partnership, without consulting anyone at The Guardian or the Times. By this point, Rusbridger remembers, Assange was envisioning working with outlets in multiple countries in order to protect the material from being shut down by a single government. Der Spiegel sent its own correspondent to London, and the three reporting teams worked side by side, though not really in collaboration. There was, Keller says, “the natural watercooler swapping of interesting information—‘Hey, did you see the one about … ?’ ” But each news organization prepared its own stories and coordinated only on the release date of certain topic areas.
The biggest gulf between WikiLeaks and the traditional news outlets lay in their approaches to editing. Put simply, WikiLeaks didn’t have one, or believe in one. “Neither us nor Der Spiegel nor The New York Times was ever going to print names of people who were going to get reprisals, anymore than we would do on any other occasion,” says David Leigh. “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.’ We were coming at it from opposite poles.” The redaction of the Afghanistan files was a point of contention within WikiLeaks as well. Associates say that Assange dismissed the need for editorial care, even as they urged him to take the task more seriously. Smári McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, told The Independent in October that there were “serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians.”
The editors agreed they would begin to publish on Sunday, July 25. After about three weeks of working on the Afghanistan files, Assange agreed to hand over his second batch of documents, the Iraq files, and each news organization set up fresh teams to pore over them. Assange himself went to London and stayed with David Leigh. He worked at The Guardian, sharing meals with the reporting teams. Within WikiLeaks, meanwhile, there were serious concerns about the amount of time Assange was spending on the Afghan and Iraq files, given the trove of other material the organization had in its hands. Colleagues also saw him becoming increasingly autocratic and dismissive.
Several days before publication, The New York Times went to the White House and the Pentagon for comment. “We agreed to share any on-the-record comments with The Guardian and Der Spiegel,” Keller says. “At the White House request, we also passed along an appeal to WikiLeaks not to publish names of confidential informants or other information that might put lives at risk.”
On Saturday, July 24, the day before release, Davies received a call from someone he knew at the television network Channel 4. “You’ll never guess who I’m with,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m with Julian Assange. He’s just given me the entire Afghan database.” Davies was livid. Assange got on the phone and explained, falsely, according to Davies, that “it was always part of the agreement that I would introduce television at this stage.” Davies and Assange have not spoken since that afternoon.
The Afghanistan War Logs appeared in the three print publications and on Channel 4. Among other things, the documents detailed hundreds of civilian deaths at the hands of Western troops and the existence of a secret “black” unit of Special Forces to hunt down Taliban leaders. It also became clear that American officials were persuaded that Pakistan’s spy service had been helping the Taliban. WikiLeaks made a clumsy effort to redact the raw material, and in fact held back some 15,000 of the 90,000 files. Still, the redaction was not comprehensive, and the documents it posted on its site revealed some individual identities. Assange’s minimal attention to redaction—potentially putting informers or people on the American payroll in danger—drew criticism from some unlikely quarters, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
The Iraq stories were initially scheduled to run two weeks later, but in early August, a week after the Afghan documents had been published, Assange summoned David Leigh to the Frontline Club, in London. Assange said he wanted the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit group, to work with Channel 4 and Al Jazeera as well on this second batch of material, and asked that Leigh delay publication to give the other outlets time to prepare programs.
Leigh said he could arrange for a six-week delay—but only if Assange gave him the third batch of documents, the so-called “package three,” potentially the most tantalizing of them all. According to Leigh, Assange said, “You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by the Guardian editor saying you won’t publish package three until I say so.” Assange got his letter.
As the date approached for release of the Iraq documents, Assange still had not redacted them. The outlets agreed on a further delay to allow the group Iraq Body Count, which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 Iraq invasion, to go through the material and suggest deletions. Leigh began to lose faith that Assange would allow The Guardian to publish package three at all. Assange had begun to talk to CBS and PBS about getting involved in the project, and seemed increasingly erratic. In August, Assange had traveled to Stockholm, and while there he slept with two different women, according to reports of their testimony to the police. In both cases, what started as consensual sex developed into encounters in which, Swedish authorities came to believe, Assange manipulated the women into having unprotected sex. An investigation was eventually opened. Sweden sought Assange for questioning, Interpol put him on its Wanted list, and he went into hiding in the British countryside. He has denied the allegations against him and maintains that the prosecution is politically motivated.
The nearly 400,000 pages of Iraq War Logs were published on October 23, amid a growing sense of unease among the media outlets, both with one another and with Assange. The Guardian’s coverage focused on civilian deaths at the hands of Allied forces and on the U.S. military’s complicit role in the torture of detainees. The Times’s coverage looked more closely at the complicating roles of countries such as Pakistan and Iran in the ongoing conflicts.
In conjunction with its stories on Iraq, the Times published a critical profile of Assange. The story, “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety,” quoted anonymous former colleagues of Assange’s citing his “erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.” The article referred to Assange’s legal troubles, stemming from the sexual-assault investigation. The reaction from Assange was vitriolic. “It’s a smear piece, and more tabloid behavior by the Times,” he said of the article. “Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?”
As The Guardian was pushing ahead with the WikiLeaks stories, it also had to contend with a troubling financial picture. At a time when newspapers around the world are struggling to devise new ways to sustain their businesses, The Guardian has been held up as a possible model—one that might work for only a handful of institutions, but a model nonetheless.
While it faces serious commercial challenges, as any newspaper does, The Guardian has long been somewhat shielded by the ownership structure established some years ago, whose sole purpose is “to secure the financial and editorial independence” of the newspaper in perpetuity. For a long time, The Guardian itself turned a profit, staking out lucrative niches in classified advertising for jobs in media, education, and the public sector. But as ad revenues fell, drained away by the Internet, the trust’s financial lifeline became all the more critical. Today, the Guardian Media Group consists of The Guardian and the weekly Observer newspaper, as well as stakes in Emap, a U.K. trade-magazine publisher, and Trader Media Group, which publishes the classified-car-advertising magazine and Web site Auto Trader. Those investments, too, have faltered. Last year the company wrote down big portions of the value of its radio division and its stake in Emap. It is currently considering selling its stake in Trader Media and possibly using the proceeds to fund The Guardian and The Observer. In 2009, The Guardian and The Observer lost £37.9 million (roughly the same as the year before) and cut 203 jobs. “They are commercially fucked,” says Marc Sands, former marketing director, who despite his prognostication says he is a loyal supporter of both papers.
Even after the job cuts, the two papers employ 630 journalists. Rusbridger is quick to point out that for 10 of the 15 years he has been editor the newspaper has turned a profit. And, he adds, hardly a paper exists today that isn’t subsidized by some other business, as The Washington Post is by its Kaplan education unit, or as some of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. newspapers are by its Fox news-and-entertainment division. “The newspaper market is only sustained on subsidy,” Rusbridger says. “The Scott Trust enables us to get on the playing field. Does it give us a bit more latitude to think widely journalistically? I think so.”
In addition to ambitious investigative projects, Rusbridger has endeavored to use The Guardian’s Web site to create the largest possible audience online, with little concern for the immediate commercial return such an audience might provide. It is through its Web site that The Guardian has established much of its international reputation, and the paper seems more comfortable than many of its rivals wading into the world of “crowd sourcing” and so-called citizen journalism. While other newspapers are putting up pay walls around their content, Rusbridger is committed to keeping the Guardian site open.
To expand its audience to the 50 million visitors that would give it more clout with advertisers, Rusbridger and his team have been looking to the U.S. After the September 11 attacks, in 2001, The Guardian’s online readership surged. One reason the site found a growing American audience is that the newspaper was one of the few voices consistently critical of the war in Iraq, which most American newspapers and news outlets supported. In 2007, Rusbridger hired former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky to launch Guardian America, a designated Guardian home page geared to American readers. Unfortunately, they never showed up on the site. Guardian America was shut down in 2009.
When the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, Carolyn McCall, announced her resignation last March to take over the C.E.O. role at the discount airline company easyJet, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid, offered some unsolicited advice for her successor. “As a fiscally responsible chief executive, my first move would be to shut down The Guardian and The Observer tomorrow, thereby saving about £50 million a year,” he told a local paper. “It would also have the pleasing effect of chucking a lot of untalented left-wing turds onto [Gordon] Brown’s bonfire. It’s a total nightmare of a job and nobody with an ounce of business acumen would touch it.”
Julian Assange’s business model appears to be no better. Although his overhead was once modest—Hrafnsson estimates that before “Collateral Murder” the organization could function on a budget of $200,000 to $300,000 a year—financial needs have ballooned as the work of WikiLeaks has become more high-profile and labor-intensive. “I don’t have the exact number of people on our payroll,” Hrafnsson says, but he estimates that there are now “a few dozen people who are committed full-time” on either short-term or long-term contracts, with hundreds of volunteers contributing their work. WikiLeaks operates almost entirely on donations, and they have fallen woefully short. Finances aside, Assange’s editorial model gives pause to anyone who gets close enough to see it firsthand. And it’s not clear that an organization like his, run the way he runs it, could ever achieve anything like longevity. Committed to a form of transparency that verges on anarchy, and operating on the sly and on the fly, it is inherently unstable.
In October, while The Guardian was preparing to publish the Iraq War Logs and working on package three, Heather Brooke, a British freelance journalist who had written a book on freedom of information, had a copy of the package-three database leaked to her by a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Leigh shrewdly invited Brooke to join the Guardian team. He did not want her taking the story to another paper. Furthermore, by securing the same database from a source other than Assange, The Guardian might then be free of its promise to wait for Assange’s green light to publish. Leigh got the documents from Brooke, and the paper distributed them to Der Spiegel and The New York Times. The three news organizations were poised to publish the material on November 8.
That was when Assange stormed into Rusbridger’s office, threatening to sue. Rusbridger, Leigh, and the editors from Der Spiegel spent a marathon session with Assange, his lawyer, and Hrafnsson, eventually restoring an uneasy calm. Some in the Guardian camp had wanted to break off relations with Assange entirely. Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table—a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately he agreed to a further delay, allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País.
Assange’s romantic appeal as a roving truth-teller was gravely damaged by the sexual-assault accusations in August, but he is still a darling of the programming and hacking community. Indeed, his pursuit by Swedish and European authorities—and the threat of a criminal investigation by the U.S. government—has made him into something of a folk hero. On the day of his arrest, supporters cried, “We love you!,” and banged on the side of the armored wagon that carried Assange away to Wandsworth prison, in southwest London. His bail was eventually posted by a group of prominent individuals. In a statement after his release, Assange protested his innocence, then made his way to the English countryside, where he will live under close supervision.
The U.S. Department of Justice is actively studying ways to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks, and seeking to find a way that doesn’t entail prosecuting their partners in the media. “I don’t want to get into specifics here, but people would have a misimpression if the only statute you think that we are looking at is the Espionage Act,” U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has said. Investigators are looking for any evidence that Assange might have encouraged the leaker—widely assumed to be Bradley Manning—or given him guidance. That could amount to “conspiracy.” But any legal case would be a minefield. One congressional staffer told me that Justice Department lawyers were likely crossing their fingers that Assange would be extradited to Sweden and convicted, so they won’t have to attempt a tricky prosecution.
On the day of Assange’s arrest, WikiLeaks released a U.S. cable from early 2009 listing sites around the world—from oil pipelines to vaccine factories—that are considered crucial to American national security. The locations of nearly all of the facilities could be identified by an Internet search, but the disclosure prompted new denunciations of WikiLeaks. For all the brave talk, the site is on the ropes. Through December, WikiLeaks still wasn’t collecting new documents from potential whistle-blowers. The site is crowded with pleas for donations. “He is short of money and short of secrets,” someone who has worked extensively with Assange told me. “The whole thing has collapsed.”
Key volunteers who were helping run the loosely organized WikiLeaks confederation have left. Smári McCarthy, who worked for WikiLeaks, maintained that “key people have become very concerned about the direction of WikiLeaks with regard to its strong focus on U.S. military files at the expense of ignoring everything else.” One associate of Assange’s says that, because of these departures, access to important elements of the site’s infrastructure has deteriorated, although Assange himself remains the key architect of the complex set of programs that underlie WikiLeaks and its content. WikiLeaks has no headquarters. Like its creator, the site has had to move from country to country to find a safe host. After its server in Sweden was attacked, WikiLeaks moved briefly to Amazon’s cloud-computing service before being kicked off and returning to Sweden. Then it shifted to Switzerland. Meanwhile, hundreds of mirror sites popped up around the world, to ensure that the Web site’s contents would survive. In late August, Assange fell out with one of his key employees, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who had been known outside the organization as the WikiLeaks spokesman “Daniel Schmitt.” Like others at WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg resisted Assange’s single-minded focus on military and diplomatic issues—and feared that Assange was becoming a lightning rod. At press time Domscheit-Berg was working on setting up a rival organization, OpenLeaks.org. He is also writing an unflattering book, scheduled to be published early this year, that will detail the strife within WikiLeaks. It accuses Assange of “high-handedness, dishonesty, and grave mistakes,” and quotes him as dismissing criticism from colleagues with the words “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end.”
David Leigh says, “Julian is staking everything on this terrific throw of the dice—that he can become the man who single-handedly rocks the U.S. administration back on its heels, and this will catapult him into making it all work again.”
The release of package three, the American diplomatic cables, on November 29, drove more than four million unique visitors to The Guardian’s Web site, its largest single day of traffic ever. The cables revealed embarrassing backroom bargains among chanceries around the world and brimmed with unflattering assessments of foreign leaders by U.S. diplomats. The cables also showed a wide array of Arab leaders urging the United States to attack Iran. Although the WikiLeaks partnership has in some ways been a triumph for The Guardian, it has also been a profound test of institutional patience. One night, after I tried unsuccessfully to reach Rusbridger by phone, he e-mailed at 12:30 A.M. his time to apologize for his silence. “Sorry about today,” he wrote. “Managing a relationship between a French afternoon paper, a Spanish daily, a German weekly, a paper on NY time, and a bunch of anarchists in hiding is trying!” No one knows whether Assange will attempt another partnership with so many media outlets, but he has promised that one of his next major revelations, rumored to involve the hard drive of a top bank executive, will occur in early 2011, and he has boasted that publication “could take down a bank or two.”
When I asked Rusbridger if he had any regrets about the way his paper handled the cables or the way it worked with WikiLeaks, he said, “No,” but his response was so tentative that it seemed to reveal how fragile the project was in his mind. “I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite well.”
The Guardian and WikiLeaks can be seen as the matter and anti-matter of modern journalism—each represents a pole at the farthest extreme, with the journalistic enterprise as a whole being torn between them. The Guardian sees itself as a mediating institution, one that applies knowledge and judgment to the gathering of facts. It believes mediation is necessary for understanding, and it knows that institutions must be built and tended with care. The high-minded creation of the Scott Trust, long ago, epitomizes this sensibility. In contrast, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks disdain the notion that anything should come between the public and the vast universe of ostensible information you can evaluate for yourself, if only someone will let you. The ideal role of a journalistic outlet, in Assange’s view, is to be a passive conduit for reality, or at least for slivers of reality, with as little intervention as possible—no editing, no contextualizing, no explanations, no thinking, no weighing of one person’s claims against another’s, no regard for consequences. The technology that Assange has worked on for most of his career possesses immense capabilities, and cannot be controlled by a single institution or voice. It is perhaps for this reason that WikiLeaks—ultimately replaceable by the next technologically savvy anarchist—is so disturbing to so many.
There can be convergence, up to a point. Under Rusbridger, The Guardian has embraced outside sources of information in what the editor likes to call “mutualization”—that is, using the best of what The Guardian’s staff can produce but also embracing the wide-open online world for what it casts into public view. This is why Rusbridger was willing to work with “a bunch of anarchists in hiding” in the first place. Assange, too, has perhaps undergone modest evolution. Originally insisting that none of his documents be redacted, he backed away from that stance somewhat when it came to the Iraq War Logs, and then backed away even further when it came to the diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has not yet released its own large cache of raw diplomatic cables; what has been made public is largely limited to what the traditional news outlets decided to make public in their stories. It may be that Assange is simply holding material out, to make other deals.) One of Assange’s former associates, disillusioned, likens Assange’s situation to the last scene in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs are shown to have become indistinguishable from the human beings they had rebelled against. Indeed, compared with others in his world of Internet provocateurs, Assange is almost a traditionalist—one of the few of his kind willing to work with the mainstream press and conform, at least fleetingly, to some of their standards.
But convergence goes only so far—there’s no reason to think that either party has shed its basic outlook, or ever will, or could. The conflict is as old as civilization itself—between those who cherish what institutions provide and those who distrust everything that institutions stand for. At the moment, in journalism, neither seems to have the upper hand—and neither can do without the other.
Keywords
Culture,
Politics,
The Guardian,
Wikileaks,
Julian Assange,
February 2010
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.
By Sarah Ellison•
Photograph by Ki Price
February 2011
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, at a news conference in London last October. The partnership forged with The Guardian leveraged Assange and his Web site into a global story. But the relationship was never an easy one.
On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. The encounter was one among many twists and turns in the collaboration between WikiLeaks—a four-year-old nonprofit that accepts anonymous submissions of previously secret material and publishes them on its Web site—and some of the world’s most respected newspapers. The collaboration was unprecedented, and brought global attention to a cache of confidential documents—embarrassing when not disturbing—about American military and diplomatic activity around the world. But the partnership was also troubled from the start.
In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.
The Guardian partnership was the first of its kind between a mainstream media organization and WikiLeaks. The future of such collaborations remains very much in doubt. WikiLeaks, torn by staff defections, technical problems, and a crippling shortage of money, has been both battered and rejuvenated by the events of the past several months. A number of companies—PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard—stopped acting as conduits for donations, even as international publicity has attracted high-profile supporters and many new donors. Kristinn Hrafnsson, a close associate of Assange’s and a WikiLeaks spokesman, promises that WikiLeaks will pursue legal action against the companies. Although it is not known where the instigation came from, hackers launched a wave of sympathy attacks on PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard operations, and temporarily shut them down. Assange himself, arrested in December on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in a sexual-assault investigation, spent time in a British prison before being granted release on bail. At press time, he awaits a decision on extradition and, in the meantime, must wear an electronic anklet, must check in with authorities daily, and must abide by a curfew. Some are pressing the U.S. government to take action against him under the Espionage Act or some other statute. Whatever the fate of WikiLeaks itself, the nature of the Internet guarantees that others will continue to step into its shoes. “The WikiLeaks concept will bring about other organizations and I wish them well,” Hrafnsson says, even as he insists that WikiLeaks is “functioning fully” without Assange.
The Guardian wasn’t the only newspaper to work with WikiLeaks. To assist in publishing the first two batches of documents—on the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq—WikiLeaks brought in two other parties, The New York Times and the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Eventually the group was expanded to include television: CNN, Al Jazeera, and Britain’s Channel 4. For the third batch of documents—the diplomatic cables—WikiLeaks worked with five print publications in a collaboration that was marked by serial delays and considerable mistrust on all sides. (“Everyone’s a cheat,” laments one editor involved in the project, looking back.) But The Guardian was the lead organization from the outset: it came up with the idea of a collaboration with WikiLeaks, and it made the arrangement work. That central role may seem odd to some. The Guardian is relatively small—it’s merely the 10th-largest national newspaper in Britain (behind The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph, and ahead of only The Independent). But it is aggressive and relentless, and performs on a global stage in a way that most bigger British newspapers simply do not.
The paper has come a long way from the old Manchester Guardian, which, as a former editor, Peter Preston, remembers, was read by “a bluff, Presbyterian, gum-boot-wearing do-gooder.” There are still many of those, but they’re reading alongside a younger, internationally minded audience attracted by The Guardian’s left-leaning politics and its influential Web site, which vies for the largest audience of any news site in Britain. And it’s not just Britain: two-thirds of the guardian.co.uk’s readers live elsewhere. Even before WikiLeaks, the paper was running attention-getting stories on subjects ranging from the Pentagon to Rupert Murdoch to British Aerospace.
The partnership between The Guardian and WikiLeaks brought together two desperately ambitious organizations that happen to be diametric opposites in their approach to reporting the news. One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards, joined up with one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers, with no standards at all except fealty to an ideal of “transparency”—that is, dumping raw material into the public square for people to pick over as they will. It is very likely that neither Alan Rusbridger nor Julian Assange fully understood the nature of the other’s organization when they joined forces. The Guardian, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones—too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace. Assange would come to see the mainstream media as a tool to be used and discarded, and at all times treated with suspicion. Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years. While the leaks haven’t produced a single standout headline that rises above the rest—perhaps because the avalanche of headlines has simply been overwhelming—the texture, context, and detail of the WikiLeaks stories have changed the way people think about how the world is run. Many comparisons have been made between the leak of these documents and Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. By today’s standards, Ellsberg’s actions look quaint: one man handed files to one news organization. The WikiLeaks documents are as revealing as the Pentagon Papers, but their quantity and range are incomparably greater. And they speak even more powerfully to the issue of secrecy itself. The collaboration of newspaper and Web site was never a marriage—more an arrangement driven by expedience, and a rocky one at that—but it will forever change the relationship between whistle-blowers and the media on which they rely.
Alan Rusbridger, 57, is quiet, rumpled, and understated. His sphinx-like demeanor belies the grab-your-lapel impact of the stories he publishes. An accomplished pianist, Rusbridger is writing a book about learning to play Chopin’s First Ballade. (He has also written several children’s books and a history of the evolution of sex manuals.) Sitting in the glass-walled conference room in The Guardian’s new headquarters, near King’s Cross station, in North London, Rusbridger gathers the staff each morning at 10 to go over the previous day’s edition and discuss what lies ahead. Unlike at almost any other paper, the news “conference” is open to anyone on staff, a democratic gesture that occasionally makes for heated conversation, though mostly the underlings stay quiet. When I attended such a conference, the week of the release of the Iraq War Logs, in late October, Rusbridger spoke so softly that I could barely hear him. One by one he called on his editors to report. “Sport,” he intoned, barely audible. The sports editor said his piece. “Comment,” Rusbridger said, again barely audible. The opinion editor gave a report. The meeting continued along these lines for 15 minutes. Then it was over, and everyone got back to work.
The Guardian came to life in the aftermath of the so-called Peterloo Massacre, in 1819. At least 11 people were killed and hundreds more injured when the local Manchester cavalry attempted to quell an unarmed crowd of demonstrators. John Edward Taylor, a young businessman, saw the violence firsthand and wrote an account that he sent to London by the night train. It was published two days later in the Manchester Gazette. His report, which contradicted the official version, made a big splash. Taylor started the Manchester Guardian two years later.
Rusbridger told the story of Taylor and the Peterloo Massacre at a gathering last fall as he introduced a panel of three of his reporters to a group of readers in a public hall on the ground floor of The Guardian’s offices. He drew a comparison between Taylor’s coverage and the work of a 29-year-old Guardian reporter, Paul Lewis, who had investigated the death of Ian Tomlinson, a newsstand operator killed in 2009 during a demonstration in London. Lewis’s reporting, which showed that Tomlinson had been struck by a police officer and knocked to the ground, contradicted claims by the authorities that he had died of a heart attack. Every Guardian editor—there have been only 11 in 190 years—has been keenly aware of the newspaper’s heritage. The power of that legacy is acknowledged in the one official bit of instruction given to each new editor, which is simply to continue on “as heretofore.”
Taylor gave The Guardian its start, but his nephew, Charles Prestwich Scott, would become the newspaper’s best-known and most influential editor. Scott took over in 1872—he was in his mid-20s—and eventually bought the paper outright. He remained at the helm for 57 years. Scott outlined the paper’s principles in a centenary editorial on May 5, 1921, in which he put forth what has become the paper’s motto: “Comment is free, but the facts are sacred.” A bust of Scott surveys the lobby of the Guardian offices.
In 1936 the Scott family created the Scott Trust and folded the newspaper into it. The arrangement was unusual—and one that some newspapers today are looking to as a model. In essence, the trust owns profitmaking businesses that generate money to subsidize the paper, should it need the support. In 1959 the Manchester Guardian dropped the birthplace from its name, and five years later The Guardian moved to London.
Because the paper was initially published in the Midlands, the early editions in London were often filled with typos. The satirical magazine Private Eye referred to the paper as “The Grauniad,” and the nickname has stuck. But to this day it remains the only British daily newspaper that runs a regular corrections column. Twelve years ago, Rusbridger appointed an ombudsman—common in the United States, but the first ever in Britain.
There is a whiff of self-importance about The Guardian that critics don’t fail to notice. But it’s also true that the newspaper has broken more big stories in recent years than any of its rivals. The Guardian has been sued for libel so many times that Rusbridger can’t immediately recall them all. Soon after Rusbridger became editor, in 1995, Jonathan Aitken, a prominent Tory M.P. who had been the subject of a Guardian investigation into his dealings with Saudi arms brokers, brought suit against the paper. In the course of a vicious legal battle he committed perjury and was sentenced to an 18-month prison sentence. (Aitken wrote a book about the episode, called Pride and Perjury. David Leigh, who was deeply involved in the paper’s coverage of Aitken and is now the Guardian’s investigations editor, wrote a book of his own, called The Liar.) Other high-profile libel actions came from the Police Federation; Matthias Rath, who encouraged aids patients in South Africa to replace their regular drugs with his unproven vitamin treatment; and Keith Schellenberg, who objected to being depicted as a multi-millionaire playboy who had turned a Scottish island into a sybaritic playground. One of the few suits the newspaper has settled is the action brought by the supermarket chain Tesco. A Guardian story, two years ago, about the company’s complex tax dealings was in fact incorrect, and the newspaper published two apologies and paid an undisclosed sum to a charity of Tesco’s choice. In the aftermath, rather than shy away from the subject of tax avoidance by big corporations, the newspaper redoubled its efforts, publishing an investigative series on the subject, “The Tax Gap,” that ran every day for two weeks.
In March of 2008, The Guardian’s Nick Davies got a tip that the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, was being sued by Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, for using a private investigator to hack into his voice mail. Davies followed up, and after more than a year of collecting data, two explosive articles appeared on The Guardian’s front page. One of them, “How News of the World Journalists Broke the Law,” maintained that some of Murdoch’s reporters had been “involved with private investigators who engaged in illegal phone-hacking.” (Among the hundreds whose voice mails were hacked: Prince William and Prince Harry.) The other article alleged that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had paid out more than a million pounds “to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.” The two articles, and many more that followed, spurred a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing, multiple lawsuits by alleged victims of phone hacking, and a battle of sorts between The Guardian and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
As The Guardian’s coverage unfolded, Rusbridger ran into Rupert Murdoch’s son James, who runs the Murdoch newspapers in Britain. “Your reporting on our company has been very hostile for a long time,” Murdoch said coolly. Rusbridger smiles almost imperceptibly as he recalls the incident.
But nothing in The Guardian’s recent record has had quite the ambition or impact of the WikiLeaks effort. The origins of the collaboration between WikiLeaks and its “media partners” date back to June 2010, when Nick Davies read a four-paragraph story in his own paper about the arrest of Private First Class Bradley Manning, an American soldier who had allegedly passed along hundreds of thousands of classified military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Davies resolved to find Assange.
Julian Assange is a 39-year-old native of Melbourne who started out his professional life as a computer hacker. He affects a smilingly helpless air and until his arrest was notoriously elusive, sleeping on the floors and couches of sympathizers and never staying long in any one place. He kept odd hours, often working through the night and then sleeping until late into the day. His only faithful companion had been a laptop. Iain Overton, editor of the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Reporting, who worked with Assange on the Iraq War Logs, says he has only seen him in one of two outfits, a dark suit for press conferences or, when he’s not onstage, a gray pullover and leather jacket. “He is not a man who looks like he’s greedy,” Overton says.
The WikiLeaks site itself was partly hosted on a server in Sweden that is lodged in a former nuclear bunker drilled deep inside the White Mountains. A few months before the Manning story broke, Assange had released through WikiLeaks the video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly firing on a group of men who included a Reuters photographer and his driver, and then firing on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded. (Twelve people were killed in the incident.) The video, which Assange titled “Collateral Murder,” became a viral sensation. In January, before the release of “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks had shut down temporarily due to a reported lack of funds. Assange made a plea for new donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages of documents relating to “corrupt banks, the U.S. detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the U.N,” and many other topics, but lacked the resources to release them. “Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and $1000, a million,” Assange wrote. As a result of the funding drive, says Kristinn Hrafnsson, by early 2010 WikiLeaks had accumulated roughly $1 million in its accounts, collected mainly by a German foundation. (The foundation, Wau Holland, is expected to release a report shortly on salaries and spending at WikiLeaks.) At the time of his meeting with Davies, Assange had repeatedly voiced frustration that his leaks hadn’t received the attention they deserved. The Guardian’s Rusbridger recently looked back through old e-mails from Assange, from a period when Assange was trying to get more notice. “In many ways, he was right,” Rusbridger says. “People weren’t paying attention.”
With “Collateral Murder,” Assange wanted to change that. He presented it first at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., then followed with an appearance on The Colbert Report, wearing a crisp white shirt and with his thin blond hair slicked back. The audience seemed to love him.
Davies started contacting anyone he thought might be able to put him in touch with Assange. “Eventually I got a phone call from one of the people who was close to Julian saying, ‘Don’t tell Julian I’m telling you this, but he’s about to fly into Brussels to give a press conference to the European Parliament.’ ” Ian Traynor, The Guardian’s European editor in Brussels, buttonholed Assange at the Parliament building and learned that WikiLeaks was looking to release two million pages of confidential documents. Davies rushed to Brussels. The next day, he and Traynor went to the Hotel Leopold, woke up Assange, and began a conversation that lasted for the next six hours.
“All I know really is what’s in the public domain,” Davies says he told Assange, “which suggests that you’ve got a very exciting bag of secrets.” Assange replied, in his slow baritone, “I have a record of every single episode involving the U.S. military in Afghanistan for the last seven years.” Davies said, “Holy moly!” Indeed, Assange went on, he had more than that: “I have a record of every single episode involving the U.S. military in Iraq since March 2003.” Assange also made reference to a third cache of documents—diplomatic cables—and to a fourth cache, containing the personal files of all prisoners who had been held at Guantánamo.
Davies made the case to Assange that the documents would effectively evaporate if they were put up as raw data on the Web—no one could make sense of so much material. Both he and Assange agreed that the Times would be a good, and protective, addition to the project. It is unlikely that U.K. courts could block publication, but it’s even more unlikely that the U.S. government would go after The New York Times, given the strong First Amendment protections and the precedent set by the Pentagon Papers case.
The two laid plans to set up a research bunker in The Guardian’s offices. They agreed that they wouldn’t talk about the project on cell phones. They agreed that, in two days, Assange would send Davies an e-mail with the address of a Web site that hadn’t previously existed, and that would exist for only an hour or two. Assange took a paper napkin with the hotel’s name and logo and circled various words. At the top he wrote, “no spaces.” By linking the words together, Davies had his password.
Davies headed back to London the next morning to consult with Rusbridger. They had two worries. First, would the material be any good? “When I had looked at little bits on his laptop, it struck me as being deeply insignificant, fragments of nothing,” Davies remembers. The other worry was that there could be material in the files that the newspaper wouldn’t want to publish, because it might hurt people on the ground.
They would know soon enough: the password released the entire WikiLeaks database on Afghanistan into their hands. Rusbridger called Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who sent Eric Schmitt, one of his most seasoned military correspondents, to London to see what was on offer. “He reported back that the material was clearly genuine, that it was quite interesting, and that it came with no strings attached,” Keller recalls, “except an embargo: the news organizations would not publish until WikiLeaks was ready to post the documents.”
Soon after, Assange brought Der Spiegel into the partnership, without consulting anyone at The Guardian or the Times. By this point, Rusbridger remembers, Assange was envisioning working with outlets in multiple countries in order to protect the material from being shut down by a single government. Der Spiegel sent its own correspondent to London, and the three reporting teams worked side by side, though not really in collaboration. There was, Keller says, “the natural watercooler swapping of interesting information—‘Hey, did you see the one about … ?’ ” But each news organization prepared its own stories and coordinated only on the release date of certain topic areas.
The biggest gulf between WikiLeaks and the traditional news outlets lay in their approaches to editing. Put simply, WikiLeaks didn’t have one, or believe in one. “Neither us nor Der Spiegel nor The New York Times was ever going to print names of people who were going to get reprisals, anymore than we would do on any other occasion,” says David Leigh. “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.’ We were coming at it from opposite poles.” The redaction of the Afghanistan files was a point of contention within WikiLeaks as well. Associates say that Assange dismissed the need for editorial care, even as they urged him to take the task more seriously. Smári McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, told The Independent in October that there were “serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians.”
The editors agreed they would begin to publish on Sunday, July 25. After about three weeks of working on the Afghanistan files, Assange agreed to hand over his second batch of documents, the Iraq files, and each news organization set up fresh teams to pore over them. Assange himself went to London and stayed with David Leigh. He worked at The Guardian, sharing meals with the reporting teams. Within WikiLeaks, meanwhile, there were serious concerns about the amount of time Assange was spending on the Afghan and Iraq files, given the trove of other material the organization had in its hands. Colleagues also saw him becoming increasingly autocratic and dismissive.
Several days before publication, The New York Times went to the White House and the Pentagon for comment. “We agreed to share any on-the-record comments with The Guardian and Der Spiegel,” Keller says. “At the White House request, we also passed along an appeal to WikiLeaks not to publish names of confidential informants or other information that might put lives at risk.”
On Saturday, July 24, the day before release, Davies received a call from someone he knew at the television network Channel 4. “You’ll never guess who I’m with,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m with Julian Assange. He’s just given me the entire Afghan database.” Davies was livid. Assange got on the phone and explained, falsely, according to Davies, that “it was always part of the agreement that I would introduce television at this stage.” Davies and Assange have not spoken since that afternoon.
The Afghanistan War Logs appeared in the three print publications and on Channel 4. Among other things, the documents detailed hundreds of civilian deaths at the hands of Western troops and the existence of a secret “black” unit of Special Forces to hunt down Taliban leaders. It also became clear that American officials were persuaded that Pakistan’s spy service had been helping the Taliban. WikiLeaks made a clumsy effort to redact the raw material, and in fact held back some 15,000 of the 90,000 files. Still, the redaction was not comprehensive, and the documents it posted on its site revealed some individual identities. Assange’s minimal attention to redaction—potentially putting informers or people on the American payroll in danger—drew criticism from some unlikely quarters, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
The Iraq stories were initially scheduled to run two weeks later, but in early August, a week after the Afghan documents had been published, Assange summoned David Leigh to the Frontline Club, in London. Assange said he wanted the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit group, to work with Channel 4 and Al Jazeera as well on this second batch of material, and asked that Leigh delay publication to give the other outlets time to prepare programs.
Leigh said he could arrange for a six-week delay—but only if Assange gave him the third batch of documents, the so-called “package three,” potentially the most tantalizing of them all. According to Leigh, Assange said, “You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by the Guardian editor saying you won’t publish package three until I say so.” Assange got his letter.
As the date approached for release of the Iraq documents, Assange still had not redacted them. The outlets agreed on a further delay to allow the group Iraq Body Count, which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 Iraq invasion, to go through the material and suggest deletions. Leigh began to lose faith that Assange would allow The Guardian to publish package three at all. Assange had begun to talk to CBS and PBS about getting involved in the project, and seemed increasingly erratic. In August, Assange had traveled to Stockholm, and while there he slept with two different women, according to reports of their testimony to the police. In both cases, what started as consensual sex developed into encounters in which, Swedish authorities came to believe, Assange manipulated the women into having unprotected sex. An investigation was eventually opened. Sweden sought Assange for questioning, Interpol put him on its Wanted list, and he went into hiding in the British countryside. He has denied the allegations against him and maintains that the prosecution is politically motivated.
The nearly 400,000 pages of Iraq War Logs were published on October 23, amid a growing sense of unease among the media outlets, both with one another and with Assange. The Guardian’s coverage focused on civilian deaths at the hands of Allied forces and on the U.S. military’s complicit role in the torture of detainees. The Times’s coverage looked more closely at the complicating roles of countries such as Pakistan and Iran in the ongoing conflicts.
In conjunction with its stories on Iraq, the Times published a critical profile of Assange. The story, “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety,” quoted anonymous former colleagues of Assange’s citing his “erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.” The article referred to Assange’s legal troubles, stemming from the sexual-assault investigation. The reaction from Assange was vitriolic. “It’s a smear piece, and more tabloid behavior by the Times,” he said of the article. “Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?”
As The Guardian was pushing ahead with the WikiLeaks stories, it also had to contend with a troubling financial picture. At a time when newspapers around the world are struggling to devise new ways to sustain their businesses, The Guardian has been held up as a possible model—one that might work for only a handful of institutions, but a model nonetheless.
While it faces serious commercial challenges, as any newspaper does, The Guardian has long been somewhat shielded by the ownership structure established some years ago, whose sole purpose is “to secure the financial and editorial independence” of the newspaper in perpetuity. For a long time, The Guardian itself turned a profit, staking out lucrative niches in classified advertising for jobs in media, education, and the public sector. But as ad revenues fell, drained away by the Internet, the trust’s financial lifeline became all the more critical. Today, the Guardian Media Group consists of The Guardian and the weekly Observer newspaper, as well as stakes in Emap, a U.K. trade-magazine publisher, and Trader Media Group, which publishes the classified-car-advertising magazine and Web site Auto Trader. Those investments, too, have faltered. Last year the company wrote down big portions of the value of its radio division and its stake in Emap. It is currently considering selling its stake in Trader Media and possibly using the proceeds to fund The Guardian and The Observer. In 2009, The Guardian and The Observer lost £37.9 million (roughly the same as the year before) and cut 203 jobs. “They are commercially fucked,” says Marc Sands, former marketing director, who despite his prognostication says he is a loyal supporter of both papers.
Even after the job cuts, the two papers employ 630 journalists. Rusbridger is quick to point out that for 10 of the 15 years he has been editor the newspaper has turned a profit. And, he adds, hardly a paper exists today that isn’t subsidized by some other business, as The Washington Post is by its Kaplan education unit, or as some of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. newspapers are by its Fox news-and-entertainment division. “The newspaper market is only sustained on subsidy,” Rusbridger says. “The Scott Trust enables us to get on the playing field. Does it give us a bit more latitude to think widely journalistically? I think so.”
In addition to ambitious investigative projects, Rusbridger has endeavored to use The Guardian’s Web site to create the largest possible audience online, with little concern for the immediate commercial return such an audience might provide. It is through its Web site that The Guardian has established much of its international reputation, and the paper seems more comfortable than many of its rivals wading into the world of “crowd sourcing” and so-called citizen journalism. While other newspapers are putting up pay walls around their content, Rusbridger is committed to keeping the Guardian site open.
To expand its audience to the 50 million visitors that would give it more clout with advertisers, Rusbridger and his team have been looking to the U.S. After the September 11 attacks, in 2001, The Guardian’s online readership surged. One reason the site found a growing American audience is that the newspaper was one of the few voices consistently critical of the war in Iraq, which most American newspapers and news outlets supported. In 2007, Rusbridger hired former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky to launch Guardian America, a designated Guardian home page geared to American readers. Unfortunately, they never showed up on the site. Guardian America was shut down in 2009.
When the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, Carolyn McCall, announced her resignation last March to take over the C.E.O. role at the discount airline company easyJet, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid, offered some unsolicited advice for her successor. “As a fiscally responsible chief executive, my first move would be to shut down The Guardian and The Observer tomorrow, thereby saving about £50 million a year,” he told a local paper. “It would also have the pleasing effect of chucking a lot of untalented left-wing turds onto [Gordon] Brown’s bonfire. It’s a total nightmare of a job and nobody with an ounce of business acumen would touch it.”
Julian Assange’s business model appears to be no better. Although his overhead was once modest—Hrafnsson estimates that before “Collateral Murder” the organization could function on a budget of $200,000 to $300,000 a year—financial needs have ballooned as the work of WikiLeaks has become more high-profile and labor-intensive. “I don’t have the exact number of people on our payroll,” Hrafnsson says, but he estimates that there are now “a few dozen people who are committed full-time” on either short-term or long-term contracts, with hundreds of volunteers contributing their work. WikiLeaks operates almost entirely on donations, and they have fallen woefully short. Finances aside, Assange’s editorial model gives pause to anyone who gets close enough to see it firsthand. And it’s not clear that an organization like his, run the way he runs it, could ever achieve anything like longevity. Committed to a form of transparency that verges on anarchy, and operating on the sly and on the fly, it is inherently unstable.
In October, while The Guardian was preparing to publish the Iraq War Logs and working on package three, Heather Brooke, a British freelance journalist who had written a book on freedom of information, had a copy of the package-three database leaked to her by a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Leigh shrewdly invited Brooke to join the Guardian team. He did not want her taking the story to another paper. Furthermore, by securing the same database from a source other than Assange, The Guardian might then be free of its promise to wait for Assange’s green light to publish. Leigh got the documents from Brooke, and the paper distributed them to Der Spiegel and The New York Times. The three news organizations were poised to publish the material on November 8.
That was when Assange stormed into Rusbridger’s office, threatening to sue. Rusbridger, Leigh, and the editors from Der Spiegel spent a marathon session with Assange, his lawyer, and Hrafnsson, eventually restoring an uneasy calm. Some in the Guardian camp had wanted to break off relations with Assange entirely. Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table—a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately he agreed to a further delay, allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País.
Assange’s romantic appeal as a roving truth-teller was gravely damaged by the sexual-assault accusations in August, but he is still a darling of the programming and hacking community. Indeed, his pursuit by Swedish and European authorities—and the threat of a criminal investigation by the U.S. government—has made him into something of a folk hero. On the day of his arrest, supporters cried, “We love you!,” and banged on the side of the armored wagon that carried Assange away to Wandsworth prison, in southwest London. His bail was eventually posted by a group of prominent individuals. In a statement after his release, Assange protested his innocence, then made his way to the English countryside, where he will live under close supervision.
The U.S. Department of Justice is actively studying ways to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks, and seeking to find a way that doesn’t entail prosecuting their partners in the media. “I don’t want to get into specifics here, but people would have a misimpression if the only statute you think that we are looking at is the Espionage Act,” U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has said. Investigators are looking for any evidence that Assange might have encouraged the leaker—widely assumed to be Bradley Manning—or given him guidance. That could amount to “conspiracy.” But any legal case would be a minefield. One congressional staffer told me that Justice Department lawyers were likely crossing their fingers that Assange would be extradited to Sweden and convicted, so they won’t have to attempt a tricky prosecution.
On the day of Assange’s arrest, WikiLeaks released a U.S. cable from early 2009 listing sites around the world—from oil pipelines to vaccine factories—that are considered crucial to American national security. The locations of nearly all of the facilities could be identified by an Internet search, but the disclosure prompted new denunciations of WikiLeaks. For all the brave talk, the site is on the ropes. Through December, WikiLeaks still wasn’t collecting new documents from potential whistle-blowers. The site is crowded with pleas for donations. “He is short of money and short of secrets,” someone who has worked extensively with Assange told me. “The whole thing has collapsed.”
Key volunteers who were helping run the loosely organized WikiLeaks confederation have left. Smári McCarthy, who worked for WikiLeaks, maintained that “key people have become very concerned about the direction of WikiLeaks with regard to its strong focus on U.S. military files at the expense of ignoring everything else.” One associate of Assange’s says that, because of these departures, access to important elements of the site’s infrastructure has deteriorated, although Assange himself remains the key architect of the complex set of programs that underlie WikiLeaks and its content. WikiLeaks has no headquarters. Like its creator, the site has had to move from country to country to find a safe host. After its server in Sweden was attacked, WikiLeaks moved briefly to Amazon’s cloud-computing service before being kicked off and returning to Sweden. Then it shifted to Switzerland. Meanwhile, hundreds of mirror sites popped up around the world, to ensure that the Web site’s contents would survive. In late August, Assange fell out with one of his key employees, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who had been known outside the organization as the WikiLeaks spokesman “Daniel Schmitt.” Like others at WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg resisted Assange’s single-minded focus on military and diplomatic issues—and feared that Assange was becoming a lightning rod. At press time Domscheit-Berg was working on setting up a rival organization, OpenLeaks.org. He is also writing an unflattering book, scheduled to be published early this year, that will detail the strife within WikiLeaks. It accuses Assange of “high-handedness, dishonesty, and grave mistakes,” and quotes him as dismissing criticism from colleagues with the words “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end.”
David Leigh says, “Julian is staking everything on this terrific throw of the dice—that he can become the man who single-handedly rocks the U.S. administration back on its heels, and this will catapult him into making it all work again.”
The release of package three, the American diplomatic cables, on November 29, drove more than four million unique visitors to The Guardian’s Web site, its largest single day of traffic ever. The cables revealed embarrassing backroom bargains among chanceries around the world and brimmed with unflattering assessments of foreign leaders by U.S. diplomats. The cables also showed a wide array of Arab leaders urging the United States to attack Iran. Although the WikiLeaks partnership has in some ways been a triumph for The Guardian, it has also been a profound test of institutional patience. One night, after I tried unsuccessfully to reach Rusbridger by phone, he e-mailed at 12:30 A.M. his time to apologize for his silence. “Sorry about today,” he wrote. “Managing a relationship between a French afternoon paper, a Spanish daily, a German weekly, a paper on NY time, and a bunch of anarchists in hiding is trying!” No one knows whether Assange will attempt another partnership with so many media outlets, but he has promised that one of his next major revelations, rumored to involve the hard drive of a top bank executive, will occur in early 2011, and he has boasted that publication “could take down a bank or two.”
When I asked Rusbridger if he had any regrets about the way his paper handled the cables or the way it worked with WikiLeaks, he said, “No,” but his response was so tentative that it seemed to reveal how fragile the project was in his mind. “I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite well.”
The Guardian and WikiLeaks can be seen as the matter and anti-matter of modern journalism—each represents a pole at the farthest extreme, with the journalistic enterprise as a whole being torn between them. The Guardian sees itself as a mediating institution, one that applies knowledge and judgment to the gathering of facts. It believes mediation is necessary for understanding, and it knows that institutions must be built and tended with care. The high-minded creation of the Scott Trust, long ago, epitomizes this sensibility. In contrast, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks disdain the notion that anything should come between the public and the vast universe of ostensible information you can evaluate for yourself, if only someone will let you. The ideal role of a journalistic outlet, in Assange’s view, is to be a passive conduit for reality, or at least for slivers of reality, with as little intervention as possible—no editing, no contextualizing, no explanations, no thinking, no weighing of one person’s claims against another’s, no regard for consequences. The technology that Assange has worked on for most of his career possesses immense capabilities, and cannot be controlled by a single institution or voice. It is perhaps for this reason that WikiLeaks—ultimately replaceable by the next technologically savvy anarchist—is so disturbing to so many.
There can be convergence, up to a point. Under Rusbridger, The Guardian has embraced outside sources of information in what the editor likes to call “mutualization”—that is, using the best of what The Guardian’s staff can produce but also embracing the wide-open online world for what it casts into public view. This is why Rusbridger was willing to work with “a bunch of anarchists in hiding” in the first place. Assange, too, has perhaps undergone modest evolution. Originally insisting that none of his documents be redacted, he backed away from that stance somewhat when it came to the Iraq War Logs, and then backed away even further when it came to the diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has not yet released its own large cache of raw diplomatic cables; what has been made public is largely limited to what the traditional news outlets decided to make public in their stories. It may be that Assange is simply holding material out, to make other deals.) One of Assange’s former associates, disillusioned, likens Assange’s situation to the last scene in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs are shown to have become indistinguishable from the human beings they had rebelled against. Indeed, compared with others in his world of Internet provocateurs, Assange is almost a traditionalist—one of the few of his kind willing to work with the mainstream press and conform, at least fleetingly, to some of their standards.
But convergence goes only so far—there’s no reason to think that either party has shed its basic outlook, or ever will, or could. The conflict is as old as civilization itself—between those who cherish what institutions provide and those who distrust everything that institutions stand for. At the moment, in journalism, neither seems to have the upper hand—and neither can do without the other.
Keywords
Culture,
Politics,
The Guardian,
Wikileaks,
Julian Assange,
February 2010
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
First of all I would like to say thanks to you all for turning in your radio reports. I have found that you can download Ira Glass's 'This American Life' radio episodes free through iTunes blog listings. Give it a try. The Canadian Broadcast Corp. is going to start broadcasting 'The American Life' in Canada this year and they also consider Ira to be the best radio show host in America.
Second is we have talked about and looked at Onion the comedy critic of news on the internet and now this:Onion's sports, news satires to air on TV
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2011/01/05/onion-satire-tv-start.html#ixzz1ACqjyvD9Onion SportsDome
The Onion is set to launch its biting media satire on television after having skewered the industry in print and online for years.
First up next week will be SportsDome, a weekly series mocking TV sports shows and general coverage with its overbearing male hosts, bouncy graphics and blaring theme music and sound effects that could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
The show, featuring a pair of co-hosts named Mark Shepard and Alex Reiser, will air on Comedy Central and The Comedy Network.
Later this month, the Onion News Network will also debut its programming on the Independent Film Channel, with a show called FactZone that skewers cable news excesses and whose tagline is "News without mercy."
IFC first announced the project in March 2010, saying it was part of a plan to stretch the specialty channel's boundaries.
FactZone, hosted by a comely, miniskirt-clad female anchor named Brooke Alvarez, is billed as "the nation's No. 1 source for breaking news, screaming political arguments and vital information on missing teenage Caucasian girls."
The same teams behind the Onion's wildly popular "fake news" videos on its website are also responsible for the two new TV projects.
"Our Onion fake media empire is slowly taking over real media. Eventually, we'll have 36 shows on different networks," executive producer Will Graham told The Associated Press.
"We're more self-important and pretentious than CNN, and we're more aggressive and biased than Fox.
"We think of them as our competitors. Fox News and MSNBC set a very high bar for their level of ridiculousness, and we're always thinking, 'We have to go just 10 per cent higher than they are'."
The Onion's online video unit was presented with a prestigious Peabody Award in 2009, with the prize panel hailing the satirical site's "online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news" as "hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing."
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2011/01/05/onion-satire-tv-start.html#ixzz1ACqhfP2b
Second is we have talked about and looked at Onion the comedy critic of news on the internet and now this:Onion's sports, news satires to air on TV
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2011/01/05/onion-satire-tv-start.html#ixzz1ACqjyvD9Onion SportsDome
The Onion is set to launch its biting media satire on television after having skewered the industry in print and online for years.
First up next week will be SportsDome, a weekly series mocking TV sports shows and general coverage with its overbearing male hosts, bouncy graphics and blaring theme music and sound effects that could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
The show, featuring a pair of co-hosts named Mark Shepard and Alex Reiser, will air on Comedy Central and The Comedy Network.
Later this month, the Onion News Network will also debut its programming on the Independent Film Channel, with a show called FactZone that skewers cable news excesses and whose tagline is "News without mercy."
IFC first announced the project in March 2010, saying it was part of a plan to stretch the specialty channel's boundaries.
FactZone, hosted by a comely, miniskirt-clad female anchor named Brooke Alvarez, is billed as "the nation's No. 1 source for breaking news, screaming political arguments and vital information on missing teenage Caucasian girls."
The same teams behind the Onion's wildly popular "fake news" videos on its website are also responsible for the two new TV projects.
"Our Onion fake media empire is slowly taking over real media. Eventually, we'll have 36 shows on different networks," executive producer Will Graham told The Associated Press.
"We're more self-important and pretentious than CNN, and we're more aggressive and biased than Fox.
"We think of them as our competitors. Fox News and MSNBC set a very high bar for their level of ridiculousness, and we're always thinking, 'We have to go just 10 per cent higher than they are'."
The Onion's online video unit was presented with a prestigious Peabody Award in 2009, with the prize panel hailing the satirical site's "online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news" as "hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing."
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2011/01/05/onion-satire-tv-start.html#ixzz1ACqhfP2b
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
The following is from Altnet which we have talked about before in class. The one of the following that I like the best is the accusation that the leaks caused deaths. Well the question I have to ask...that begs to be asked is does the American military cause deaths. Give me a break. How many eggs to you have to break to make an omelet? And the really bogus one that I don't think is talked about here is the Ivory coast revelation that the opposition guy supported putting pressure on the country secretly as the people in the country did not like the idea of outside pressures. Well that is exactly what the people in a democracy need to know, however inconvenient that might be to us idealists.
AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva
comments_image 96 COMMENTS
8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media
Shredding the corporate media's malicious attacks on WikiLeaks.
December 31, 2010 |
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:
Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.
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The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of "zombie lies" -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information.
Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves.
1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted).
That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties.
2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks "indiscriminately" dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim.
Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once.
3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now.
While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has "profited" from "criminal" acts.
The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.
4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise. Public officials and pundits continue to claim that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet, even though it procured the scoop of a decade. But much of what WikiLeaks does is identical to the activities of other news sources. WikiLeaks receives secrets from anonymous sources, which it then reveals to the public -- news is nothing if not a checks and balances system for the government, a fundamental right of a free press. Secondly, it curates those secrets before revealing them -- a journalist selecting relevant and appropriate material from a confidential document is not that different from WikiLeaks redacting certain parts of the cables.
Because WikiLeaks’ actions fall under the First Amendment, all journalists should be outraged if the American government attempts to prosecute. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted for conducting a journalistic enterprise, what rights will be stripped from journalists in the future? One of the most respected journalistic institutions in the world, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is speaking out. Earlier this month, 20 faculty members drafted and signed a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder saying that WikiLeaks' prosecution will set a “dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity ... Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.”
The Walkley Foundation, an institution of journalism in Assange’s home of Australia, put it more succinctly in its own letter of support for WikiLeaks: “To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.”
5. Denying a link between Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, despite Ellsberg's support of the site. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied classified documents that proved the Johnson administration had lied to the American public about the chances of winning the Vietnam War, which it knew from the beginning were slim to none. By 1970, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the desperate situation and began circulating the documents, first to U.S. senators, then to the New York Times, which reported the contents in a groundbreaking series of articles that set in motion the end to the war...and the Nixon administration. By doing so, he helped end an unjust war carried out in the name of the American people. His actions are widely heralded.
In a parallel scenario, WikiLeaks is acting the part of the Times and other outlets that reported the Pentagon Papers -- releasing information of secret, and in many cases, unjust actions carried out in the name of the American people without our knowledge. Alleged leaker Bradley Manning is the Ellsberg in this situation; similarly, if chats between himself and Adrian Lamo printed in Wired are true, he unleashed the cables out of an overwhelming sense of justice, saying, "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
Earlier this month, Ellsberg appeared on the Colbert Report and praised Manning. “If Bradley Manning did what he's accused of, then he's a hero of mine and I think he did a great service to this country,” said Ellsberg. “We're not in the mess we're in, in the world, because of too many leaks....I say there should be some secrets. But I also say we invaded Iraq illegally because of a lack of a Bradley Manning at that time.”
6. Accusing Assange of profiting from WikiLeaks. Newspapers this week led with reports that Assange has signed a lucrative book deal, information that inspired mainstream outlets like CNN to mock Assange for "profiting" from the cables despite his anti-corporate ideology. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald if he had "Any qualms about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information." Greenwald pointed out that Assange is hardly profiting from the leaked materials, but rather trying to make a dent in the legal fees he's accruing as governments around the world go after him. Greenwald also pointed out that trying to make money from journalism is pretty routine in the profession. Bob Woodward, for example, has written multiple books based on classified documents.
7. Calling Assange a terrorist. Last week Vice-President Joe Biden, part of an administration that's overseen the escalation of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, joined Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin in calling Assange a "terrorist."
As far as we know, Assange's leaks haven't killed anyone. Nor has he threatened to perpetrate violence to promote a political agenda, the definition of terrorism. Nevertheless public officials continue to try to link Assange to terrorism in the public consciousness.
8. Minimizing the significance of the cables. Even though only a tiny fraction of the cables have been released, many critics promote the idea that they reveal "nothing new" and are therefore of no value. But even the cables released so far have contained important revelations about the U.S. and its allies.
Here are just a few of the stories revealed by the documents:
-- U.S. special forces working inside Pakistan
-- UK agreed to shield U.S. interests in Iraq probe
-- Secret bombings of Yemen
-- State Department role in the Honduran coup
-- U.S. pressured Spain to drop Bush torture probe
-- U.S. sought to retaliate against Europe over refusing to allow Monsanto GM crops
-- Drug Enforcement Agency goes global, beyond drugs
-- Shell's grip on the Nigerian state
The promise that the next release will target a U.S. bank, and that it will have an effect similar to the Enron disclosures, according to Assange, certainly portends that the trove of information we haven’t yet seen could be explosive. And that is incredibly valuable to the American public.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites. Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.
AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva
comments_image 96 COMMENTS
8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media
Shredding the corporate media's malicious attacks on WikiLeaks.
December 31, 2010 |
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:
Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.
Petitions by Change.org|Get Widget|Start a Petition �
The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of "zombie lies" -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information.
Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves.
1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted).
That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties.
2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks "indiscriminately" dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim.
Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once.
3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now.
While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has "profited" from "criminal" acts.
The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.
4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise. Public officials and pundits continue to claim that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet, even though it procured the scoop of a decade. But much of what WikiLeaks does is identical to the activities of other news sources. WikiLeaks receives secrets from anonymous sources, which it then reveals to the public -- news is nothing if not a checks and balances system for the government, a fundamental right of a free press. Secondly, it curates those secrets before revealing them -- a journalist selecting relevant and appropriate material from a confidential document is not that different from WikiLeaks redacting certain parts of the cables.
Because WikiLeaks’ actions fall under the First Amendment, all journalists should be outraged if the American government attempts to prosecute. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted for conducting a journalistic enterprise, what rights will be stripped from journalists in the future? One of the most respected journalistic institutions in the world, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is speaking out. Earlier this month, 20 faculty members drafted and signed a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder saying that WikiLeaks' prosecution will set a “dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity ... Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.”
The Walkley Foundation, an institution of journalism in Assange’s home of Australia, put it more succinctly in its own letter of support for WikiLeaks: “To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.”
5. Denying a link between Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, despite Ellsberg's support of the site. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied classified documents that proved the Johnson administration had lied to the American public about the chances of winning the Vietnam War, which it knew from the beginning were slim to none. By 1970, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the desperate situation and began circulating the documents, first to U.S. senators, then to the New York Times, which reported the contents in a groundbreaking series of articles that set in motion the end to the war...and the Nixon administration. By doing so, he helped end an unjust war carried out in the name of the American people. His actions are widely heralded.
In a parallel scenario, WikiLeaks is acting the part of the Times and other outlets that reported the Pentagon Papers -- releasing information of secret, and in many cases, unjust actions carried out in the name of the American people without our knowledge. Alleged leaker Bradley Manning is the Ellsberg in this situation; similarly, if chats between himself and Adrian Lamo printed in Wired are true, he unleashed the cables out of an overwhelming sense of justice, saying, "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
Earlier this month, Ellsberg appeared on the Colbert Report and praised Manning. “If Bradley Manning did what he's accused of, then he's a hero of mine and I think he did a great service to this country,” said Ellsberg. “We're not in the mess we're in, in the world, because of too many leaks....I say there should be some secrets. But I also say we invaded Iraq illegally because of a lack of a Bradley Manning at that time.”
6. Accusing Assange of profiting from WikiLeaks. Newspapers this week led with reports that Assange has signed a lucrative book deal, information that inspired mainstream outlets like CNN to mock Assange for "profiting" from the cables despite his anti-corporate ideology. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald if he had "Any qualms about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information." Greenwald pointed out that Assange is hardly profiting from the leaked materials, but rather trying to make a dent in the legal fees he's accruing as governments around the world go after him. Greenwald also pointed out that trying to make money from journalism is pretty routine in the profession. Bob Woodward, for example, has written multiple books based on classified documents.
7. Calling Assange a terrorist. Last week Vice-President Joe Biden, part of an administration that's overseen the escalation of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, joined Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin in calling Assange a "terrorist."
As far as we know, Assange's leaks haven't killed anyone. Nor has he threatened to perpetrate violence to promote a political agenda, the definition of terrorism. Nevertheless public officials continue to try to link Assange to terrorism in the public consciousness.
8. Minimizing the significance of the cables. Even though only a tiny fraction of the cables have been released, many critics promote the idea that they reveal "nothing new" and are therefore of no value. But even the cables released so far have contained important revelations about the U.S. and its allies.
Here are just a few of the stories revealed by the documents:
-- U.S. special forces working inside Pakistan
-- UK agreed to shield U.S. interests in Iraq probe
-- Secret bombings of Yemen
-- State Department role in the Honduran coup
-- U.S. pressured Spain to drop Bush torture probe
-- U.S. sought to retaliate against Europe over refusing to allow Monsanto GM crops
-- Drug Enforcement Agency goes global, beyond drugs
-- Shell's grip on the Nigerian state
The promise that the next release will target a U.S. bank, and that it will have an effect similar to the Enron disclosures, according to Assange, certainly portends that the trove of information we haven’t yet seen could be explosive. And that is incredibly valuable to the American public.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites. Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.
Monday, January 03, 2011
e-news:The “Digital Newsstand” Race Becomes: Who Is More Willing To Trick Users, Apple Or Google?
MG Siegler
Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space.
A story in the Wall Street Journal this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this has been going on for months now as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, really just the iPad so far) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms.
Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece:
Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.
Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.
So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy.
Of course few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model currently works. Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space.
And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece:
In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.
It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that.
Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted.
In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data.
And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board.
And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad.
MG Siegler
Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space.
A story in the Wall Street Journal this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this has been going on for months now as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, really just the iPad so far) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms.
Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece:
Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.
Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.
So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy.
Of course few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model currently works. Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space.
And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece:
In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.
It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that.
Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted.
In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data.
And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board.
And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Love this one from Slashdot, great with the US trying shut down Wikileaks:
US To Host World Press Freedom Day
| from the enjoy-the-freedom dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 08, @13:44 (Media)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rekrowyalp writes "From the press release: 'The United States is pleased
to announce that it will [0]host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event
in 2011. The United States places technology and innovation at the
forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has
empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances,
express opinions on world events, and exchange information in
environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to
freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the
determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and
to restrict the free flow of information.' Oh the irony."
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm
US To Host World Press Freedom Day
| from the enjoy-the-freedom dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 08, @13:44 (Media)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rekrowyalp writes "From the press release: 'The United States is pleased
to announce that it will [0]host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event
in 2011. The United States places technology and innovation at the
forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has
empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances,
express opinions on world events, and exchange information in
environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to
freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the
determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and
to restrict the free flow of information.' Oh the irony."
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm
Wiki Leaks Update:
WikiLeaks Took Advice From Media Outlets
| from the pentagon-papers-on-the-resume dept.
| posted by timothy on Sunday December 05, @11:50 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
formfeed writes "According to the AP (through Google News), WikiLeaks
isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by
bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the
other way around: '[0]only after considering advice from five news
organizations with which it chose to share all of the material' are they
releasing it themselves. These newspapers 'have been advising WikiLeaks
on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to
those documents.' AP questions whether WikiLeaks will follow these
redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this 'extraordinary
collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets
and the WikiLeaks organization.'" I wonder if some of the
[1]anti-WikiLeaks fervor evident among US lawmakers will also be brought
to bear against the AP and other mainstream media sources. Update: 12/05
17:42 GMT by [2]T : Yes, that's WikiLeaks, rather than (as originally
rendered) WikiPedia. HT to reader Mike Hearn.
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0Vruimmvy8loGklsz34QyGDKMDA?docId=120c7bf5d3a34dbaadf1280dace2e456
1. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/131885-senators-unveil-anti-wikileaks-legislation
WikiLeaks Took Advice From Media Outlets
| from the pentagon-papers-on-the-resume dept.
| posted by timothy on Sunday December 05, @11:50 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
formfeed writes "According to the AP (through Google News), WikiLeaks
isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by
bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the
other way around: '[0]only after considering advice from five news
organizations with which it chose to share all of the material' are they
releasing it themselves. These newspapers 'have been advising WikiLeaks
on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to
those documents.' AP questions whether WikiLeaks will follow these
redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this 'extraordinary
collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets
and the WikiLeaks organization.'" I wonder if some of the
[1]anti-WikiLeaks fervor evident among US lawmakers will also be brought
to bear against the AP and other mainstream media sources. Update: 12/05
17:42 GMT by [2]T : Yes, that's WikiLeaks, rather than (as originally
rendered) WikiPedia. HT to reader Mike Hearn.
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0Vruimmvy8loGklsz34QyGDKMDA?docId=120c7bf5d3a34dbaadf1280dace2e456
1. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/131885-senators-unveil-anti-wikileaks-legislation
In our last class I would like to analyse this story for meaning:
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level
03 December 2010 @ 09:09 am EST
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic.{AND CHILDREN ARE NOT MEN OR WOMEN SO WE DO NOT KNOW IF THERE IS ANY DIFERENCE IN AFFECT OR Fear) Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death.
These are some of the conclusions drawn from a research entitled Educación para la muerte: Estudio sobre la construcción del concepto de muerte en niños de entre 8 y 12 años de edad en el ámbito escolar, [Education On Death: A Study On The Building Of The Concept Of Death In Children Aged Between 8 And 12 At School] conducted at the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment at the University of Granada by Claudia Fabiana Siracusa, and led by professors Francisco Cruz Quintana y Mª Nieves Pérez Marfil.
For the purpose of this study, researchers took a sample of 288 children, aged between 8 and 12, including their parents, tutors and teachers. The professors at the University of Granada analysed how adults' understanding of the concept of death affects children's attitudes, fears, beliefs and approaches to death.
A change In Mentality
This study revealed the need for a change in mentality within families and at school, regarding death and the end of life. The reason is that an appropriate approach to death is key to children's health and personality. Other conclusions were that all children –to a higher or lower degree- have had experiences related to death, that they believe in life after death, and that they are concerned about it. Additionally, it is more common among girls to believe in life after death than among boys.
As regards teachers, 80% of them reported that death was not included in the curriculum. Six out of ten recognised that they have occasionally talked about death with their students, mostly due to the death of a students' relative.
In the light of the results obtained, University of Granada researchers consider that it is essential to provide death education "as a way to value life, and an instrument to end with the misguided and unreal idea transmitted by the media. Such education would provide children with the appropriate strategies and resources to approach death during their lives, avoiding any slight or severe negative impact on their physical or psychological health."
Another finding was that a high educational level prevents negative attitudes, as fear of death and avoiding the topic. In accordance with the teachers that participated in the study, "at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented."
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level
03 December 2010 @ 09:09 am EST
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic.{AND CHILDREN ARE NOT MEN OR WOMEN SO WE DO NOT KNOW IF THERE IS ANY DIFERENCE IN AFFECT OR Fear) Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death.
These are some of the conclusions drawn from a research entitled Educación para la muerte: Estudio sobre la construcción del concepto de muerte en niños de entre 8 y 12 años de edad en el ámbito escolar, [Education On Death: A Study On The Building Of The Concept Of Death In Children Aged Between 8 And 12 At School] conducted at the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment at the University of Granada by Claudia Fabiana Siracusa, and led by professors Francisco Cruz Quintana y Mª Nieves Pérez Marfil.
For the purpose of this study, researchers took a sample of 288 children, aged between 8 and 12, including their parents, tutors and teachers. The professors at the University of Granada analysed how adults' understanding of the concept of death affects children's attitudes, fears, beliefs and approaches to death.
A change In Mentality
This study revealed the need for a change in mentality within families and at school, regarding death and the end of life. The reason is that an appropriate approach to death is key to children's health and personality. Other conclusions were that all children –to a higher or lower degree- have had experiences related to death, that they believe in life after death, and that they are concerned about it. Additionally, it is more common among girls to believe in life after death than among boys.
As regards teachers, 80% of them reported that death was not included in the curriculum. Six out of ten recognised that they have occasionally talked about death with their students, mostly due to the death of a students' relative.
In the light of the results obtained, University of Granada researchers consider that it is essential to provide death education "as a way to value life, and an instrument to end with the misguided and unreal idea transmitted by the media. Such education would provide children with the appropriate strategies and resources to approach death during their lives, avoiding any slight or severe negative impact on their physical or psychological health."
Another finding was that a high educational level prevents negative attitudes, as fear of death and avoiding the topic. In accordance with the teachers that participated in the study, "at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented."
Anti Journalism: And this Blog Presents The Freedom Reporter of the Year to: Bradley Manning THE REAL TOTAL MAN OF THE YEAR!!
Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning?
| from the also-who-killed-jfk dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, @16:45 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more
than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but
[1]refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC
Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. "In late May,
Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a
government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to
be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private
allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables,
documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,"
writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes
Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding
journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did
not do. "Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played
a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning
arrest," concludes Greenwald. "This has long ago left the realm of mere
journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of
active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen.""
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/27/wired/
Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning?
| from the also-who-killed-jfk dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, @16:45 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more
than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but
[1]refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC
Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. "In late May,
Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a
government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to
be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private
allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables,
documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,"
writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes
Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding
journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did
not do. "Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played
a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning
arrest," concludes Greenwald. "This has long ago left the realm of mere
journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of
active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen.""
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/27/wired/
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
If you would like to see the following article with all the bells and whistles (bar charts, pie charts etc.) go to this URL:http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/82886/how-broken-is-game-journalism-an-analysis-of-three-gaming-sites/
How Broken is Game Journalism? An Analysis of Three Gaming Sites
RSS by Joseph Jackmovich on 02 December 2010, 32495 views
* Digg
* ?
* ?
* Twitter
* Facebook
Top ten lists, objectification of women, and the wholesale copying of press releases; these are some of the unfortunate trends in gaming journalism today.
Some would call game journalism a kind of enthusiast press, and on many counts I find it hard to disagree with them. Like with other forms of enthusiast press, big gaming sites rely not only on strict gaming news, but also an array of gaming-related stories to flesh out their coverage. Sometimes these related stories fall within acceptable levels. At other times some of the content posted to gaming blogs makes me feel simply terrible for the state of the field.
Jim Sterling, review editor at Destructoid, says that calling game journalism a form of journalism at all is usually incorrect.
“I think calling it ‘journalism’ is wrong most of the time,” Sterling said. “Publishers have way too much power over outlets, the review scoring system is mired in backwards thinking that says anything below a 7/10 is unacceptable, and we have some websites writing purely for Google Trends and not for their readers.”
Stating that “we’re in an industry ruled by PR bullshit,” Sterling went on to discuss how outlets are under the thumb of publishers when negative coverage comes to light.
“I’ve lost count of the amount of times I or my editor-in-chief have received a phone call over something I’ve said,” Sterling said. “Nobody really digs honesty, least of all big publishers who get any score below an eight.”
Brett Walton, founder of VGChartz.com, thinks that the world of gaming journalism needs a kick to get itself on track. Walton is on the same page as Sterling when it comes to the issue of publishers having too much power in regard to the flow of information to outlets.
“Well, personally I feel that gaming journalism needs a big shake up,” Walton said. “Much of the current ‘journalism’ consists of re-worded press releases. Essentially, the publishers have most of the power and control the flow of information to the press. Given online media's reliance on ad revenues to fund sites (VGC included), we have to be careful to build and cultivate relationships. The pattern is along the lines of - we cover their PR, they send us review copies and invite us for visits, we give positive reviews and they support with ad budgets and campaigns.”
These are serious issues, and ones that are particularly troubling to a field that depends on official sources for the kind of coverage that brings in a strong foundation of readership. It’s difficult to run a site simply on original content so the foundation of news becomes central to bringing in readers on a regular and recurring basis.
How severe and structural is the problem of reliance on official sources? Is gaming coverage professional or does coverage lean towards off topic and sexist pieces to generate hits?
Anecdotal glances through top gaming sites reveal gamers to be little more than children in men’s bodies, giggling at the sight of breasts and having pseudo-intellectual discussions about facial hair. But is the coverage presented really as bad as it looks? To find the answers to these questions I planned a content analysis to gauge how well some gaming news outlets are performing.
I decided to visit three top gaming sites: Joystiq, Destructoid and Kotaku. Using a sampling method known as the constructed week, I assembled a total of 161 randomly selected articles from the three publications representing a week of coverage during the month of October. For each day of the constructed week, I pulled 25% of each publication’s total published articles, leading to a total of 63 articles from Kotaku, 51 from Joystiq, and 47 from Destructoid.
I wanted to find out quantitatively exactly how gaming journalism is performing when it comes to several factors: topic of coverage, number and type of sources, number of errors, aggressive and/or sexist material, and tendency to editorialize hard news.
My main interests were the measurements of sourcing and editorializing. It was my hypothesis that gaming journalism has an unhealthy alliance with official sources for information, and that many times those official sources are the only sources cited. Many fields of journalism suffer from this same type of problem, but it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss exactly why that is.
For editorializing, this is a trend I am seeing more and more on internet-based news delivery services. The trend to editorialize produces more entertaining or controversial content, generating hits and getting more people talking in the comments and becoming unique users for the purposes of calculating traffic data and advertising rates.
Unfortunately editorializing also forces the opinion of the writer into the news. While many argue that this allows the site to gain unique voices for reporting, I say that those unique voices can be heard through original pieces and not through hard news data. It is my hypothesis that gaming journalism is heavily editorialized and I feel that professional coverage suffers as a result.
The first focus of analysis was the first thing a reader sees – the headline. Headlines were graded as acceptable, misleading, wrong, or overly sensational. Out of 161 headlines, 141 were acceptable, which translates to an 87 percent acceptability rate. The remaining 14 percent was made up of four misleading headlines, one factually wrong headline, and 15 overly sensational headlines. The breakdown of misleading headlines by publication can be seen in the graph below.
For examples of misleading headlines, below are three randomly selected misleading headlines along with their publication.
# EA Loses Spine, Drops Taliban from Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# What Do Boobs And Goombas Have In Common? – Kotaku
# These Are Some Nice Nuts – Kotaku
Overall headlines are acceptable, but while unacceptable headlines are in a minority they unfortunately serve as stark anecdotal examples as some of the failings of game journalism. However, while 14 percent may seem like a small number, it is far too high for any field of professional reporting. Especially as a headline is the first thing a reader sees in a story, proper headline usage is critical in building positive relationships with readers, particularly that incredibly important first impression. How would you expect a reader new to gaming and gaming reporting to react if the first headline they saw on a noteworthy game blog was “These Are Some Nice Nuts?”
As both Walton and Sterling mentioned earlier, publishers have an unwieldy amount of influence over outlets and the information they can receive. Out of 161 articles, 126 of them had only a single source listed, equaling 78 percent. Only 11 articles used 2 or more sources, and 24 cited none. When it comes to the issue of citing only official sources for a story, 91 or 56 percent of articles only went to the official source, which can include press releases, quotes from developers about their upcoming game, or quotes from publishing executives. Below are two graphs detailing the breakdown of sourcing by publication.
It’s hard to single out where this problem originates from. Publishers and other officials are expected to be tight-lipped about information, but to what extent are outlets responsible for searching out more sources? Obviously a good deal of game-specific information merits only a single source, so maybe the problem of sourcing is a flaw with the makeup of game journalism itself.
In any case, the makeup of an industry is no excuse for complacent reporters and even if searching out other sources constitutes a good deal of dead ends, that’s par for the course for a journalist. Readers demand and expect journalists to go the extra mile and find not only the story that is being told, but also those stories that aren’t being told.
Jim Sterling had something to say about this topic that I wholeheartedly support. He advocates that outlets need to be more daring in their coverage, and that outlets should express solidarity in that tenacity.
“We need more outlets to have the balls to risk getting blacklisted by publishers,” Sterling said. “If enough publications did it, then publishers would be forced to re-assess how they deal with negative publicity.”
When it comes to the subject of coverage, it would not be a stretch of the imagination to guess that larger companies receive the most coverage. As more people are interested in the work of larger companies, coverage of those companies equals more relevant news for more people. Of course running the news of larger companies over smaller ones can have the effect of causing unbalanced coverage; especially when that fact is combined with the problems of sourcing discussed earlier.
Electronic Arts had the largest percentage of coverage with 12 percent of the 161 articles. Sadly, articles unrelated to gaming tied for second with Sony at 9 percent. Nintendo and Microsoft rounded out the top five covered topics at 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Of the unrelated posts analyzed, Kotaku published 73 percent of them.
The fact that topics unrelated to gaming rank above coverage for companies like Nintendo and Microsoft is absolutely terrible. While blame can be pointed at editors, writers, or readers I hold that those primarily responsible are the editors of these publications.
In an internet world, the ability to comment on stories allows readers, editors, and writers to interact on coverage in a way never before possible. The problem is that comments can be heavily moderated to reduce the appearance of dissent to these articles. You’ll discover that going through many of these unrelated stories that there is little comment about why this particular story is being placed on a gaming website. Is that because readers truly enjoy this unrelated coverage or is it because of heavy-handed moderation? As publications allow for little transparency in their moderation procedures, I place responsibility in the hands of those in charge of producing content.
The following is a randomly selected list of three unrelated gaming articles, by publication.
# The Sakura Wars Creator, The Young Idol and the Rumored Sleepover – Kotaku
# Medal of Honor: This is Beard 1 – Kotaku
# Treat Yourself to this Pac-Pumpkin Halloween Lawn Decoration – Joystiq
A fundamental issue to this problem is that these blogs thrive on hits and post counts. Given their immense popularity, anything that is published will generate at least some readership, so the guideline seems to be “post often, anything goes, censor dissent,” rather than simply “let’s report solid news about video games.”
These sites are some of the top gaming sites in the world yet 12% of their coverage deals with lawn decorations, facial hair, and Japanese culture. It is unfair to paint Joystiq and Destructoid equally as culpable in this respect as Kotaku is responsible for a majority of these posts, but all of these sites have a responsibility to not only responsible and professional coverage, but responsible and professional coverage relevant to gaming as a subject matter.
The world of internet news is driven by interactivity. Readers do more than simply read; they interact. Reporters and readers communicate in story comments, Twitter, and various internet forums. As a result internet reporting has a tendency to promote an editorial form that promotes people to discuss a story rather than simply digest it.
Of the articles analyzed 68% demonstrated some form of editorializing. Kotaku editorialized at 60 percent, Joystiq at 67 percent, and Destructoid at 79 percent.
While I understand the need for publications to editorialize to generate interest and controversy in news stories, there are clear problems in the levels of editorializing seen.
Writers are in a position of authority to readers pushing opinions through hard news can have detrimental effects on simply digesting the news itself. If a game release is mentioned to be garbage in the article, gamers unfamiliar with the title may not research that opinion and simply take it as fact. Couple the authority of writers with the potentiality for harsh comment moderation and you have a readership that is digesting more opinions than news.
If gaming journalism is ever to become a respected and professional field, editorializing should be left to the editorial page. Analysis and commentary can be presented separately from stories in a different section. Alternatively (and less ideal) is the application of opinions solely at the end of a news story, rather than interspersed throughout. While this still maintains the same problems as aforementioned, at least the opinions would stand out by themselves and be more easily recognizable by readers.
Grammatical and factual errors are the bane of any journalist. Details as minute as a misspelled name or improperly placed photograph can lead to libel or false light lawsuits. While gaming journalism is not quite at risk as other fields of enthusiast press to libel suits, the standard of perfection in copy should be desired and in most cases, attained.
Of the articles analyzed 30 grammatical errors were found in a total of 161 articles. There was only one factual error discovered, in the form of an incorrect headline. Below is a breakdown of total grammatical errors by publication.
Distributing out the numbers of grammatical errors with the number of published articles, Kotaku has a 36 percent chance of having a grammatical error in an article, with Joystiq at 4 percent and Destructoid at 11 percent.
As these stories are all internet-based, an accurate count of grammatical or factual errors is always in flux. Stories can be edited while they are live with no announcement to the reader of the edit. Of course this means that stories should be totally clear of grammatical errors as long as editors maintain vigilance and allow for readers to point out errors so they can be corrected.
Edits should be transparent. While striking out or changing large chunks of copy are very different kinds of edits, a note of an edit being made to a story should at the very least be included somewhere on the page to allow readers insight into the workings of the publication. Stories are always alive on the internet, able to be changed a minute or a year after publication. Some record should remain of changes made.
The final study of measurement is the inclusion of sexist and aggressive/offensive text or images in stories. Professional journalists should strive for the absolute elimination of sexist tonality in stories and aggressive/offensive tonality should be left to the editorial page.
There was a total of 27 aggressive/offensive articles for a total of 17 percent and a total of 12 sexist articles for a total of 7 percent.
Below is a randomly selected list of three sexist articles, by publication.
# Shop Contest: Pinkwashing – Kotaku
# Dream Club for Xbox 360 Destroys Subtlety with Hostess Sausage Feeding – Kotaku
# Here’s Where Cammie Dunaway Literally Went – Joystiq
Below is a randomly selected list of three aggressive/offensive articles, by publication.
# See Duke Nukem Forever’s First Person Pissing, Gameplay in Action – Kotaku
# Review: Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# Killzone 3 Beta Open to PS Plus Subscribers Only – Destructoid
For sexism to exist in game journalism it not only perpetuates a negative stereotype of gamers but it establishes that stereotype as existing even in the coverage of gaming. Gamers should not be ashamed or worried to go to their favorite gaming sites in public or at work. I had to explain the hostess sausage feeding article to a few people in the graduate lounge at my university because of its content. Gamers are not breast-obsessed adolescents with only the objectifying of women and killstreaks on our minds. We are adults – treat us as such.
As for aggressive/offensive tonality, there is a certain amount of taste that each publication must agree upon themselves. For the addition of sensationalism there does come a price however. If an outlet wants to be sensational and aggressive in its tonality, it simply gives up the illusion of being professional. Professional journalists do not pen the kind of aggressive and offensive content found not only in game journalism stories, but also some of its headlines.
So what does all of this mean for game journalism? It means that while some of the problems may not be as severe as some may think, there is still a long way to go. But first game journalism needs to decide whether it’s an enthusiast press or not; also whether it wants to maintain a colloquial tone with readers or evolve a more professional tone.
Dan Amrich, a man with years in the field working for outlets like GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, and GamesRadar, admits that the title of “game journalist” has always given him pause.
“I was never comfortable being called a ‘games journalist,’” Amrich said. “I was an entertainment reporter and a game critic, whereas journalism implies a more noble goal and a different skillset than I employed…I am providing a service, but I am not sure if I am providing journalism.”
Amrich has a strong point, and it’s one that I wrestle with as well. But is game journalism consigned to the fate of enthusiast press or can it become more?
Pulitzer Prize winner and Indiana University professor Tom French says that journalism is a part of memorializing the times that we all share together.
“The main job is to chronicle a little bit of what life is like on this planet,” French said. “Gaming is a part of many people’s lives and becoming more so every day. It’s important that journalists covering gaming take the job seriously.”
I contend that it can become more, but it requires the effort of editors and writers around the globe. We need to show solidarity in our professionalism and our commitment to the readers rather than spewing sexist and unrelated nonsense on our front pages. We can be professional, if only we act like it.
It’s time we changed. Gamers before were ostracized because they were nerds, social outcasts incapable of gainful interaction with others. Gaming, and gamers, has grown a great deal since then.
But the coverage has not. I am not part of a group that disrespects women and has a fascination with Japan and anime simply because I play video games. Stop presenting gamers as such.
Let’s turn our strength of colloquial reporting and passion for the industry into a passion for powerful reporting. Let’s discover trends, investigate poor game development, and do a real service for our readers.
Game journalism does not have to settle for the crumbs of information thrown from the tables of publishers and public relations agencies. Like other fields of journalism, game journalism should be expected to hold up the traditions of investigative reporting, fact-finding, and a dedication to giving the readers accurate and prompt information.
Journalism is a proud field with many powerful figures in its past. Ernie Pyle, Alice Dunnigan, the Bernstein and Woodward duo; these are names synonymous with the field of journalism. If game journalists want to share their title with some of these storied writers, they need to stop acting like contracted PR agents and start acting like journalists.
Is it foolish to compare game journalism to the likes of these storied journalists? Maybe.
Is it foolish to not aspire to give the best and most complete coverage available to readers, despite the field? Definitely.
We can do better.
Disclaimer: This article is the work of one writer, and does not necessarily reflect the views of gamrFeed or VGChartz.
Header photo credit: Flickr user e.phelt
How Broken is Game Journalism? An Analysis of Three Gaming Sites
RSS by Joseph Jackmovich on 02 December 2010, 32495 views
* Digg
* ?
* ?
Top ten lists, objectification of women, and the wholesale copying of press releases; these are some of the unfortunate trends in gaming journalism today.
Some would call game journalism a kind of enthusiast press, and on many counts I find it hard to disagree with them. Like with other forms of enthusiast press, big gaming sites rely not only on strict gaming news, but also an array of gaming-related stories to flesh out their coverage. Sometimes these related stories fall within acceptable levels. At other times some of the content posted to gaming blogs makes me feel simply terrible for the state of the field.
Jim Sterling, review editor at Destructoid, says that calling game journalism a form of journalism at all is usually incorrect.
“I think calling it ‘journalism’ is wrong most of the time,” Sterling said. “Publishers have way too much power over outlets, the review scoring system is mired in backwards thinking that says anything below a 7/10 is unacceptable, and we have some websites writing purely for Google Trends and not for their readers.”
Stating that “we’re in an industry ruled by PR bullshit,” Sterling went on to discuss how outlets are under the thumb of publishers when negative coverage comes to light.
“I’ve lost count of the amount of times I or my editor-in-chief have received a phone call over something I’ve said,” Sterling said. “Nobody really digs honesty, least of all big publishers who get any score below an eight.”
Brett Walton, founder of VGChartz.com, thinks that the world of gaming journalism needs a kick to get itself on track. Walton is on the same page as Sterling when it comes to the issue of publishers having too much power in regard to the flow of information to outlets.
“Well, personally I feel that gaming journalism needs a big shake up,” Walton said. “Much of the current ‘journalism’ consists of re-worded press releases. Essentially, the publishers have most of the power and control the flow of information to the press. Given online media's reliance on ad revenues to fund sites (VGC included), we have to be careful to build and cultivate relationships. The pattern is along the lines of - we cover their PR, they send us review copies and invite us for visits, we give positive reviews and they support with ad budgets and campaigns.”
These are serious issues, and ones that are particularly troubling to a field that depends on official sources for the kind of coverage that brings in a strong foundation of readership. It’s difficult to run a site simply on original content so the foundation of news becomes central to bringing in readers on a regular and recurring basis.
How severe and structural is the problem of reliance on official sources? Is gaming coverage professional or does coverage lean towards off topic and sexist pieces to generate hits?
Anecdotal glances through top gaming sites reveal gamers to be little more than children in men’s bodies, giggling at the sight of breasts and having pseudo-intellectual discussions about facial hair. But is the coverage presented really as bad as it looks? To find the answers to these questions I planned a content analysis to gauge how well some gaming news outlets are performing.
I decided to visit three top gaming sites: Joystiq, Destructoid and Kotaku. Using a sampling method known as the constructed week, I assembled a total of 161 randomly selected articles from the three publications representing a week of coverage during the month of October. For each day of the constructed week, I pulled 25% of each publication’s total published articles, leading to a total of 63 articles from Kotaku, 51 from Joystiq, and 47 from Destructoid.
I wanted to find out quantitatively exactly how gaming journalism is performing when it comes to several factors: topic of coverage, number and type of sources, number of errors, aggressive and/or sexist material, and tendency to editorialize hard news.
My main interests were the measurements of sourcing and editorializing. It was my hypothesis that gaming journalism has an unhealthy alliance with official sources for information, and that many times those official sources are the only sources cited. Many fields of journalism suffer from this same type of problem, but it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss exactly why that is.
For editorializing, this is a trend I am seeing more and more on internet-based news delivery services. The trend to editorialize produces more entertaining or controversial content, generating hits and getting more people talking in the comments and becoming unique users for the purposes of calculating traffic data and advertising rates.
Unfortunately editorializing also forces the opinion of the writer into the news. While many argue that this allows the site to gain unique voices for reporting, I say that those unique voices can be heard through original pieces and not through hard news data. It is my hypothesis that gaming journalism is heavily editorialized and I feel that professional coverage suffers as a result.
The first focus of analysis was the first thing a reader sees – the headline. Headlines were graded as acceptable, misleading, wrong, or overly sensational. Out of 161 headlines, 141 were acceptable, which translates to an 87 percent acceptability rate. The remaining 14 percent was made up of four misleading headlines, one factually wrong headline, and 15 overly sensational headlines. The breakdown of misleading headlines by publication can be seen in the graph below.
For examples of misleading headlines, below are three randomly selected misleading headlines along with their publication.
# EA Loses Spine, Drops Taliban from Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# What Do Boobs And Goombas Have In Common? – Kotaku
# These Are Some Nice Nuts – Kotaku
Overall headlines are acceptable, but while unacceptable headlines are in a minority they unfortunately serve as stark anecdotal examples as some of the failings of game journalism. However, while 14 percent may seem like a small number, it is far too high for any field of professional reporting. Especially as a headline is the first thing a reader sees in a story, proper headline usage is critical in building positive relationships with readers, particularly that incredibly important first impression. How would you expect a reader new to gaming and gaming reporting to react if the first headline they saw on a noteworthy game blog was “These Are Some Nice Nuts?”
As both Walton and Sterling mentioned earlier, publishers have an unwieldy amount of influence over outlets and the information they can receive. Out of 161 articles, 126 of them had only a single source listed, equaling 78 percent. Only 11 articles used 2 or more sources, and 24 cited none. When it comes to the issue of citing only official sources for a story, 91 or 56 percent of articles only went to the official source, which can include press releases, quotes from developers about their upcoming game, or quotes from publishing executives. Below are two graphs detailing the breakdown of sourcing by publication.
It’s hard to single out where this problem originates from. Publishers and other officials are expected to be tight-lipped about information, but to what extent are outlets responsible for searching out more sources? Obviously a good deal of game-specific information merits only a single source, so maybe the problem of sourcing is a flaw with the makeup of game journalism itself.
In any case, the makeup of an industry is no excuse for complacent reporters and even if searching out other sources constitutes a good deal of dead ends, that’s par for the course for a journalist. Readers demand and expect journalists to go the extra mile and find not only the story that is being told, but also those stories that aren’t being told.
Jim Sterling had something to say about this topic that I wholeheartedly support. He advocates that outlets need to be more daring in their coverage, and that outlets should express solidarity in that tenacity.
“We need more outlets to have the balls to risk getting blacklisted by publishers,” Sterling said. “If enough publications did it, then publishers would be forced to re-assess how they deal with negative publicity.”
When it comes to the subject of coverage, it would not be a stretch of the imagination to guess that larger companies receive the most coverage. As more people are interested in the work of larger companies, coverage of those companies equals more relevant news for more people. Of course running the news of larger companies over smaller ones can have the effect of causing unbalanced coverage; especially when that fact is combined with the problems of sourcing discussed earlier.
Electronic Arts had the largest percentage of coverage with 12 percent of the 161 articles. Sadly, articles unrelated to gaming tied for second with Sony at 9 percent. Nintendo and Microsoft rounded out the top five covered topics at 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Of the unrelated posts analyzed, Kotaku published 73 percent of them.
The fact that topics unrelated to gaming rank above coverage for companies like Nintendo and Microsoft is absolutely terrible. While blame can be pointed at editors, writers, or readers I hold that those primarily responsible are the editors of these publications.
In an internet world, the ability to comment on stories allows readers, editors, and writers to interact on coverage in a way never before possible. The problem is that comments can be heavily moderated to reduce the appearance of dissent to these articles. You’ll discover that going through many of these unrelated stories that there is little comment about why this particular story is being placed on a gaming website. Is that because readers truly enjoy this unrelated coverage or is it because of heavy-handed moderation? As publications allow for little transparency in their moderation procedures, I place responsibility in the hands of those in charge of producing content.
The following is a randomly selected list of three unrelated gaming articles, by publication.
# The Sakura Wars Creator, The Young Idol and the Rumored Sleepover – Kotaku
# Medal of Honor: This is Beard 1 – Kotaku
# Treat Yourself to this Pac-Pumpkin Halloween Lawn Decoration – Joystiq
A fundamental issue to this problem is that these blogs thrive on hits and post counts. Given their immense popularity, anything that is published will generate at least some readership, so the guideline seems to be “post often, anything goes, censor dissent,” rather than simply “let’s report solid news about video games.”
These sites are some of the top gaming sites in the world yet 12% of their coverage deals with lawn decorations, facial hair, and Japanese culture. It is unfair to paint Joystiq and Destructoid equally as culpable in this respect as Kotaku is responsible for a majority of these posts, but all of these sites have a responsibility to not only responsible and professional coverage, but responsible and professional coverage relevant to gaming as a subject matter.
The world of internet news is driven by interactivity. Readers do more than simply read; they interact. Reporters and readers communicate in story comments, Twitter, and various internet forums. As a result internet reporting has a tendency to promote an editorial form that promotes people to discuss a story rather than simply digest it.
Of the articles analyzed 68% demonstrated some form of editorializing. Kotaku editorialized at 60 percent, Joystiq at 67 percent, and Destructoid at 79 percent.
While I understand the need for publications to editorialize to generate interest and controversy in news stories, there are clear problems in the levels of editorializing seen.
Writers are in a position of authority to readers pushing opinions through hard news can have detrimental effects on simply digesting the news itself. If a game release is mentioned to be garbage in the article, gamers unfamiliar with the title may not research that opinion and simply take it as fact. Couple the authority of writers with the potentiality for harsh comment moderation and you have a readership that is digesting more opinions than news.
If gaming journalism is ever to become a respected and professional field, editorializing should be left to the editorial page. Analysis and commentary can be presented separately from stories in a different section. Alternatively (and less ideal) is the application of opinions solely at the end of a news story, rather than interspersed throughout. While this still maintains the same problems as aforementioned, at least the opinions would stand out by themselves and be more easily recognizable by readers.
Grammatical and factual errors are the bane of any journalist. Details as minute as a misspelled name or improperly placed photograph can lead to libel or false light lawsuits. While gaming journalism is not quite at risk as other fields of enthusiast press to libel suits, the standard of perfection in copy should be desired and in most cases, attained.
Of the articles analyzed 30 grammatical errors were found in a total of 161 articles. There was only one factual error discovered, in the form of an incorrect headline. Below is a breakdown of total grammatical errors by publication.
Distributing out the numbers of grammatical errors with the number of published articles, Kotaku has a 36 percent chance of having a grammatical error in an article, with Joystiq at 4 percent and Destructoid at 11 percent.
As these stories are all internet-based, an accurate count of grammatical or factual errors is always in flux. Stories can be edited while they are live with no announcement to the reader of the edit. Of course this means that stories should be totally clear of grammatical errors as long as editors maintain vigilance and allow for readers to point out errors so they can be corrected.
Edits should be transparent. While striking out or changing large chunks of copy are very different kinds of edits, a note of an edit being made to a story should at the very least be included somewhere on the page to allow readers insight into the workings of the publication. Stories are always alive on the internet, able to be changed a minute or a year after publication. Some record should remain of changes made.
The final study of measurement is the inclusion of sexist and aggressive/offensive text or images in stories. Professional journalists should strive for the absolute elimination of sexist tonality in stories and aggressive/offensive tonality should be left to the editorial page.
There was a total of 27 aggressive/offensive articles for a total of 17 percent and a total of 12 sexist articles for a total of 7 percent.
Below is a randomly selected list of three sexist articles, by publication.
# Shop Contest: Pinkwashing – Kotaku
# Dream Club for Xbox 360 Destroys Subtlety with Hostess Sausage Feeding – Kotaku
# Here’s Where Cammie Dunaway Literally Went – Joystiq
Below is a randomly selected list of three aggressive/offensive articles, by publication.
# See Duke Nukem Forever’s First Person Pissing, Gameplay in Action – Kotaku
# Review: Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# Killzone 3 Beta Open to PS Plus Subscribers Only – Destructoid
For sexism to exist in game journalism it not only perpetuates a negative stereotype of gamers but it establishes that stereotype as existing even in the coverage of gaming. Gamers should not be ashamed or worried to go to their favorite gaming sites in public or at work. I had to explain the hostess sausage feeding article to a few people in the graduate lounge at my university because of its content. Gamers are not breast-obsessed adolescents with only the objectifying of women and killstreaks on our minds. We are adults – treat us as such.
As for aggressive/offensive tonality, there is a certain amount of taste that each publication must agree upon themselves. For the addition of sensationalism there does come a price however. If an outlet wants to be sensational and aggressive in its tonality, it simply gives up the illusion of being professional. Professional journalists do not pen the kind of aggressive and offensive content found not only in game journalism stories, but also some of its headlines.
So what does all of this mean for game journalism? It means that while some of the problems may not be as severe as some may think, there is still a long way to go. But first game journalism needs to decide whether it’s an enthusiast press or not; also whether it wants to maintain a colloquial tone with readers or evolve a more professional tone.
Dan Amrich, a man with years in the field working for outlets like GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, and GamesRadar, admits that the title of “game journalist” has always given him pause.
“I was never comfortable being called a ‘games journalist,’” Amrich said. “I was an entertainment reporter and a game critic, whereas journalism implies a more noble goal and a different skillset than I employed…I am providing a service, but I am not sure if I am providing journalism.”
Amrich has a strong point, and it’s one that I wrestle with as well. But is game journalism consigned to the fate of enthusiast press or can it become more?
Pulitzer Prize winner and Indiana University professor Tom French says that journalism is a part of memorializing the times that we all share together.
“The main job is to chronicle a little bit of what life is like on this planet,” French said. “Gaming is a part of many people’s lives and becoming more so every day. It’s important that journalists covering gaming take the job seriously.”
I contend that it can become more, but it requires the effort of editors and writers around the globe. We need to show solidarity in our professionalism and our commitment to the readers rather than spewing sexist and unrelated nonsense on our front pages. We can be professional, if only we act like it.
It’s time we changed. Gamers before were ostracized because they were nerds, social outcasts incapable of gainful interaction with others. Gaming, and gamers, has grown a great deal since then.
But the coverage has not. I am not part of a group that disrespects women and has a fascination with Japan and anime simply because I play video games. Stop presenting gamers as such.
Let’s turn our strength of colloquial reporting and passion for the industry into a passion for powerful reporting. Let’s discover trends, investigate poor game development, and do a real service for our readers.
Game journalism does not have to settle for the crumbs of information thrown from the tables of publishers and public relations agencies. Like other fields of journalism, game journalism should be expected to hold up the traditions of investigative reporting, fact-finding, and a dedication to giving the readers accurate and prompt information.
Journalism is a proud field with many powerful figures in its past. Ernie Pyle, Alice Dunnigan, the Bernstein and Woodward duo; these are names synonymous with the field of journalism. If game journalists want to share their title with some of these storied writers, they need to stop acting like contracted PR agents and start acting like journalists.
Is it foolish to compare game journalism to the likes of these storied journalists? Maybe.
Is it foolish to not aspire to give the best and most complete coverage available to readers, despite the field? Definitely.
We can do better.
Disclaimer: This article is the work of one writer, and does not necessarily reflect the views of gamrFeed or VGChartz.
Header photo credit: Flickr user e.phelt
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