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How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets
- ugh 17y agoI find it incredibly hard to form a coherent opinion on Wikileaks. Value judgments are important when publishing information which was not public before. Making sure that whistleblowers are actually whistleblowers (i.e. they actually raise valid concerns about wrongdoings) seems important to me. That seems like something Wikileaks doesn’t even want to be very good at. Let’s make that less abstract: Wikileaks plans on publishing 37,000 e-mails from the German radical right wing (basically Nazi) party NPD. They won’t do any filtering, so there might be hundreds or thousands of perfectly harmless e-mails among those 37,000. I’m by no means a fan of the NPD but assholes have a right to privacy, too. I don’t have so much a problem with obtaining those e-mails but somebody should really sort through them – searching for stuff that is actually newsworthy – prior to making it all public. I know that’s something Wikileaks cannot possibly accomplish with their resources. That’s what journalists are supposed to do. I also see how again and again journalists failed to do that job and how Wikileaks has managed to be damn effective. Hence my dilemma.
- bootload 17y agoFrom the article: "... "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background ..." You are spot on with your observation. I've noticed the trend in what passes for Journalism in some news organisations to emphasize information and skew context, analysis and background. We still need Journalists and Journalism for this reason.