THE MEDIA
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INTERVIEWS
Bill Keller, the New York Times' executive editor, published an enormous article on the 26th of January about the New York Times' dealings with Wikileaks. The article develops further the running story of Wikileaks' relationship with its media partners, the subject of a Vanity Fair piece earlier in the month. Much has been made of the negative light in which Julian Assange appears in the article.
2011-01-29: Bill Keller & WL
How Many Documents?
Correction Dec. 28, 2010 In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish "251,287 leaked United States embassy cables," as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released.
Thanks to one persistent listener, NPR published a correction admitting that it has mistakenly – and more than once – inflated the number of State Department diplomatic cables released recently by WikiLeaks. Since the cables first became public on Nov. 28, NPR had repeatedly referred to “thousands” of confidential State Department cables. In reality, as of December 30, 2010 , only 1,947 are publicly available. Here’s a hat tip to Henry Norr, a San Francisco listener who frequently complains about NPR's news coverage. He first contacted to me on Dec. 13. about this NPRWikiLeaks story.
NPR Apologizes for WikiLeaks Mistake
The diplomatic records exposed on the WikiLeaks website this week reveal not only secret government communications, but also an extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the Wikileaks organization, just as U.S. officials target WikiLeaks in a criminal investigation. Unlike earlier disclosures by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of secret government records, the group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material. "They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters. WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.
collab. with respected media
JOURNALISM (broad)
CONTRA
PRO
THE GUARDIAN
VANITY FAIR
In a recent interview to The Guardian, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke of his fears that the United Kingdom might meet the requests from Washington to extradite him to the United States, and later he may be either kept in solitary confinement or murdered “Jack Ruby-style”. This is a reference to a story dating back to mid 1960s when a Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby murdered John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and later died in prison of lung cancer. Shortly before his death, Ruby himself complained that he had been injected for cancer.
Summary Voice of Russia
It goes without saying the Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has never been one to shy away from uttering an outrageous soundbite (he's usually first to the camera, if at all possible). But he is also the incoming Chairman of the Homeland Security Commission (a position he held from 2005-2007) and his recent announcement that he intends to begin hearings on Muslim-American radicalization has been met with much concern. Most recently from the NYT which published a scathing editorial this weekend warning King that "Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security is a very serious job.
King Wants NYT Indicted For Espionage
NYT on J.A. (oct. 2010)
He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own the way other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends. “By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr.
Why Journalists not defending J.A.
If you think prosecuting journalists is the province solely of the sort of authoritarian governments in the developing world and the former communist bloc, think again. In the wake of WikiLeaks’s late-November dump of thousands of diplomatic cables, American provocateurs are urging the prosecution of the site’s founder, Julian Assange, and others who were involved in bringing the cables to the public’s attention. Of course, the alleged leaker, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning , will face prosecution for giving away state secrets.
Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals. That’s because the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information.
Assault on Journalism
Media VS WL
I’d like to ask Chuck Todd: if Bush had John Yoo write a memo opining that it was perfectly legal for Bush to deploy hit squads within the U.S. to assassinate American citizens without any due process, would it be wrong to investigate and prosecute that, too, on the ground that everyone had permission slips from a DOJ lawyer and that’s just what lawyers do? The current President has, of course, obtained his own DOJ permission slip to assassinate American citizens without due process. Since that permission slip is too secret for us to see, we do not know whether the authorized assassination power is confined to foreign soil or extends to the U.S., although once one embraces the Bush-Cheney-Yoo theory that the entire world is a “battlefield,” there is no coherent way to limit those asserted powers to foreign soil.