Individual vs. Institution
Two must-reads in regards to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks...Article #1: An Assange profile in The New Yorker from about six months ago. The computer hacker would have still been a marvelous gift to the world if the only thing he was ever responsible for in his life was changing the war euphemism "collateral damage" to the more appropriate "collateral murder." But fortunately, his greater legacy will be that he made our most powerful global institutions more accountable to the people. Perhaps some lessons being taught today will eventually become universally understood. For example, as the author of this article correctly points out, U.S. military officials would have had a much smaller public relations problem to deal with in regards to the Apache helicopter atrocity in Iraq in 2007 if, instead of the video of the civilian attack ultimately being presented to the world by an anarchist as an online documentary entitled, yes, "Collateral Murder," they had originally complied with any one of the multiple Freedom of Information Act requests by news outlets that called for the release of the video.
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And Article #2: Glenn Greenwald's Tuesday piece at Salon, which, among its several brilliant insights, addresses the shameful commitment by some major American news outlets throughout this episode to protect the government in stark contradiction to their stated journalistic missions to actually police it.
Key passage:
Most political journalists rely on their relationships with government officials and come to like them and both identify and empathize with them. By contrast, WikiLeaks is truly adversarial to those powerful factions in exactly the way that these media figures are not: hence, the widespread media hatred and contempt for what WikiLeaks does. Just look at how important it was for (New York Times editor) Bill Keller to emphasize that the Government is criticizing WikiLeaks but not The New York Times; having the Government pleased with his behavior is his metric for assessing how good his "journalism" is. If the Government is patting him on the head, then it's proof that he acted "responsibly." That servile-to-power mentality is what gets exposed by the contrast Wikileaks provides.
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And finally, maybe instead of prosecuting Julian Assange as a "foreign terrorist," as Representative Pete King suggests, the voters of New York's 3rd congressional district should call upon Assange to take King's seat in the U.S. House. Assange, after all, is doing King's job for him as it's actually the Constitutional mandate of Congress to act as watchdog over the Executive Branch of government, and the Departments of State and Defense.
From both of these articles, we get to the one of the true evils in the American political class-- traditional media outlets as willing accomplices.
posted by CM @ 10:00 PM
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