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Their value, despite spinning thir leaks, lies in publishing original, often secret, sources after all and also in exerting distinct pressure on certain players
by dsplittgerber 16y ago
Their value, despite spinning thir leaks, lies in publishing original, often secret, sources after all and also in exerting distinct pressure on certain players who have something to hide from the public (e.g. government, julius bär case etc). The public is much better off for the existence of the Afghan War Logs. No need to trust embedded journalists or the government anymore, but access to direct source material.
- tptacek 16y agoIt is far from clear that the public is better off for the existence of the Afghan War Logs. The claims in favor of them are about as credible as the claims against them. Maybe they're a revelation on the same scale as the Pentagon Papers. Or, maybe they're a raw running transcript of a phenomenon (AfPak becoming a counterproductive slog) even the government itself acknowledges. Maybe they're putting tens or hundreds of informants who worked against the Taliban --- or even people who just have similar names to those people --- at risk of assassination. Or, maybe that's never going to happen and Wikileaks did a good enough job sanitizing the release. It's also one thing to suggest that we shouldn't trust "embedded journalists", and another to suggest that there is no value in filtering, contextualization, and summarization by experts. Maybe most of our "mainstream" experts suck, but I think you'll have a hard time with the argument that all of them do, or with the idea that people in general will do a better job with "the raw feed". Look at the Tea Party, the Cordoba House controversy, and the "Obama is a muslim" meme for evidence that backs up my side of this argument.