In early July, The Guardian received a huge excel document with over 92,201 rows of data, it took them almost a month to separate the story from the stats. What was revealed was a story of civilian killings by coalition forces, increasing attacks by Taliban forces and questions over Pakistan and Irans involvement with the insurgency.
Once the Afghan War Logs were published on 25th July, they became the biggest story in Wikileaks history. A site with a reputation for publishing classified documents, wikileaks has most recently been the source of the classified Baghdad airstrike video and publishing all the pager messages sent on 9/11. But is this website acting in our interests, a poster child of Internet journalism? Or rather is it a website simply leaking confidential information for publicity and with little consideration of the human consequences?
The Internet has changed many things for better or worse in recent years. The rise of Internet journalism (bloggers) for instance, has started a new wave of investigative political journalism. However many argue that this new journalism fails to follow the established rules of traditional journalism; no story is to personal, no secret (no matter how damaging) is too classified to reveal.
Wikileaks is believed by some to be the pinnacle of this new paradigm, a website which, it is argued, breaks potentially damaging secrets for the sake of it. Many times it is argued that there is no real story in what is being published, the story IS that secret documents have been published.
This is the argument that the American administration has taken with the recent leak. President Obama has claimed that these leaks shine little light on the events in Afghanistan beyond what was already known, and in fact put soldiers at risk in the process. For many governments and older news agencies, the actions of websites such as Wikileaks are "irresponsible" and damaging to politics.
However for the younger generation of journalists, Wikileaks is simply a continuation of the free press meeting the free internet. Take a look at Facebook for instance, a website where millions of people freely post highly private information on themselves for the world to see. For the older generations, information has always been private, the idea of open information is something that should be strictly controlled.
Had a more traditional news source been the origin of the leak rather than Wikileaks, I believe the resulting fallout would have been far different. The raw data would have been hidden from the public, whilst a series of stories would have been drip-fed into the mainstream press in order to maximise profits. In this new system however, the data was
published for the world to see, and it was left to the news organisations to find the story.
Right or wrong, the Afghan War Logs have shone a light onto the changing world of politics and political journalism. A field undergoing a fundamental shift from private to public, driven by a new generation of young news sources such as Wikileaks.
Once the Afghan War Logs were published on 25th July, they became the biggest story in Wikileaks history. A site with a reputation for publishing classified documents, wikileaks has most recently been the source of the classified Baghdad airstrike video and publishing all the pager messages sent on 9/11. But is this website acting in our interests, a poster child of Internet journalism? Or rather is it a website simply leaking confidential information for publicity and with little consideration of the human consequences?
The Internet has changed many things for better or worse in recent years. The rise of Internet journalism (bloggers) for instance, has started a new wave of investigative political journalism. However many argue that this new journalism fails to follow the established rules of traditional journalism; no story is to personal, no secret (no matter how damaging) is too classified to reveal.
Wikileaks is believed by some to be the pinnacle of this new paradigm, a website which, it is argued, breaks potentially damaging secrets for the sake of it. Many times it is argued that there is no real story in what is being published, the story IS that secret documents have been published.
This is the argument that the American administration has taken with the recent leak. President Obama has claimed that these leaks shine little light on the events in Afghanistan beyond what was already known, and in fact put soldiers at risk in the process. For many governments and older news agencies, the actions of websites such as Wikileaks are "irresponsible" and damaging to politics.
However for the younger generation of journalists, Wikileaks is simply a continuation of the free press meeting the free internet. Take a look at Facebook for instance, a website where millions of people freely post highly private information on themselves for the world to see. For the older generations, information has always been private, the idea of open information is something that should be strictly controlled.
Had a more traditional news source been the origin of the leak rather than Wikileaks, I believe the resulting fallout would have been far different. The raw data would have been hidden from the public, whilst a series of stories would have been drip-fed into the mainstream press in order to maximise profits. In this new system however, the data was
published for the world to see, and it was left to the news organisations to find the story.
Right or wrong, the Afghan War Logs have shone a light onto the changing world of politics and political journalism. A field undergoing a fundamental shift from private to public, driven by a new generation of young news sources such as Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment