Wikileaks and The Mainstream

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Ackland has spent more than 30 years in journalism and publishing. He has also hosted Late Night Live on ABC Radio National and later the network’s breakfast program Daybreak. In 1999, he won a Gold Walkley award for his work as writer and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch. Richard Ackland is the founder of Law Press of Australia, which publishes the journals Justinian and the Gazette of Law and Journalism. On Wednesday 27 January 2011, Richard Ackland joined Janet Albrechtsen, Wendy Bacon and Gerard Henderson to address The Sydney Institute on the Wikileaks phenomenon.

WIKILEAKS AND THE MAINSTREAM

RICHARD ACKLAND

I think a fair conjecture at the outset is that Wendy Bacon and I are largely in favour of what WikiLeaks has done … and that Janet Albrechtsen and Gerard Henderson are not. I may be wrong about that, but I suspect our different beginnings and roles in journalism may inform our positions on this topic.

Let’s commence with the release of the State Department cables, which are the nub of the current controversy. It received a trove of about a quarter of a million documents allegedly from Bradley Manning an Army private and with access to classified and computerised material. The Pentagon has estimated that approximately 500,000 people in the US administration would have been able to access this material. http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=5164701 It was made available by WikiLeaks under an unusual agreement originally with The Guardian. Subsequently, The New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel and The Sydney Morning Herald entered into sharing agreements. The newspapers would select what cables it wanted, edit them, redact them, and publish them to its readers. WikiLeaks wanted to control the timing of this process.

The whistle blowing website would then publish the redacted versions of the stories published by its partner newspapers. So far WikiLeaks has not yet published anything from these cables than has not already been published by these six papers. About one per cent of the 250,000 cables have been published in edited form (2,000 in all). The key components of the collaboration arrangement was spelled out last year in an interesting article from Associated Press.         http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9JSC3P00.htm

There have been occasions when the publishing arrangement has been misrepresented. For instance, The Guardian published an article – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/ jan/03/zimbabwe-morgan-tsvangirai – which said that US cables showed that the private position of Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was that sanctions against his country by the west should remain. His public position, in line with that of President Robert Mugabe, had been that sanctions should be lifted. The article said that WikiLeaks may have committed its “own collateral murder” by publishing this cable as it exposed Tsvangirai to great risk in Zimbabwe.

This was repeated across numerous media. But, as Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald points out, this damaging cable had not been published by WikiLeaks, only by The Guardian:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/12/propaganda

The Guardian ultimately corrected the record:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2011/jan/13/wikileaks-morgan-tsvangirai-inside-guardian

Last month Vanity Fair shed fresh light on the relationship between Assange and the mainstream newspapers: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102

Assange’s requirement that he give permission for the publication of the cable stories by the partner newspapers unravelled when disgruntled elements within WikiLeaks itself leaked the last big bundle of US State Department cables to The Guardian.

The Guardian claimed that these documents were outside the original agreement it had with WikiLeaks and it could publish them according to its own timetable. Assange had a heated confrontation with The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger on the afternoon of November 1 last year. He threatened to sue the paper if it went ahead and published stories based on these cables.

As Vanity Fair journalist Sarah Ellison put it:

Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become a victim of his own methods.

Rusbridger managed to cool things down. It had not gone unnoticed that earlier in the relationship there had been a sense of betrayal. At the time the Afghan war logs were about to be exclusively published by The Guardian, the NYT and Der Spigel, Assange had told them he had decided he wanted Channel 4 to be included in the story.

The response to the cable leaks by various characters on the American political stage was shrill, even shrilled than might normally be expected. Some on the right said that Assange should be hunted down and killed, like a terrorist. Senator Joe Lieberman said he would introduce amendments to the Espionage Act that retrospectively would make the publication of classified material a crime. He also said The New York Times and other news organisations should be investigated for breaking the law:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-joe-lieberman-new-york-times-investigated

Revelations

Alan Rusbridger has said that no one has demonstrated there has been damage to life or limb arising from the publication of the cables:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/wikileaks-julian-assange-alan-rusbridger

The casualty fallout has been confined to the removal to another post of one US diplomat embarrassed by one of the leaks. The editing and redactions had been carefully done. There had been no “dump of documents” as had been asserted. Instead, most of what has been revealed has been information that legitimately should have been in the public domain. If anything the release reminded us once again of the tendency of public servants to over-classify anything that comes across the desk. Here are some examples I’d put in that category:

• The secret arrangements between US and British officials to subvert the plan to ban cluster bombs.

• The US government lobbied to restrict the terms of reference of the Chilcot inquiry.

• That China is not enthralled by its allies North Korea or Burma and in principle is not opposed to the reunification of North and South Korea.

• The Governor of the Bank of England had doubts about the economic credentials of incoming Prime Minister David Cameron.

• Lobbying by the United States of Spain, Germany and Italy to go soft on CIA agents implicated in acts of torture.

• Arab leaders secretly urging the US to bomb Iran.

Some of it is obviously embarrassing to the US and its allies, but from a public interest perspective embarrassment alone should not be a constraint on citizens’ right to know what their governments are up to. The partner newspapers also had a powerful argument that publication was justified because of the lies told by political leaders in the United States, Britain and Australia to drum up support for the war in Iraq. Many of these cables, even if only the perspective of an individual diplomat, exposed the fallout from the false case for war.

Journalism

The publication of the diplomatic cables was one of the great journalistic scoops in the last 30 years. It had been made possible by the development of technology and encryption techniques that allowed people anonymously to upload confidential material onto a website without their identity being exposed. If WikiLeaks could do this with such success, why not the mainstream media? Why is it necessary for there to be an intermediary that is neither the original source nor, as it turned out, the only source? The New York Times has realised this and is developing its own encryption software so readers can upload leaks directly onto part of the NYT web site. No need for WikiLeaks at all.

Assange

Certainly lengthy essays (and in one case as book) by the two principal newspaper editors in this story suggest that Assange is a nightmare of a person. Critics from within his own organisation accuse him of being uncaring about protecting the names of people who might be endangered should classified material be published. It’s easy to get the impression from his public utterances that Assange has a Messiah complex. Rusbridger in his long piece grandly entitled: “The Guardian‘s role in the biggest leak in the history of the world”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/wikileaks-julian-assange-alan-rusbridger

said that “few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate”.

He turned out to be a “confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher”. In due course the situation became even more difficult when the sexual allegations against Assange and the Swedish extradition proceedings made him the story. He claimed that The Guardian owed it to him, because he was such a terrific source, not to investigate the lurid sex story. When it did publish a detailed report of the Swedish allegations (at this stage not charges) once again, he threatened to sue.

For Assange transparency and openness have their limits. Bill Keller, the editor of The New York Times, also published an essay “Dealing with Assange and the WikiLeaks secrets”: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html

He was not as restrained as Rusbridger: “I do not regard Assange as a partner and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.” And this …

The deviant with his backpack and sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled and he favoured fashionably skinny suits and ties. he became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and he was evidently a magnet for women.” Keller’s reporters found Assange, “arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous.

None of which should take away from the extraordinary achievement of WikiLeaks in helping the mainstream media deliver some of their best scoops in recent memory.

Legal

Rusbridger points out that it is unlikely Assange could be prosecuted in the United States without also putting five editors in the dock. The person who will pay the real penalty in this, should he ultimately be convicted, is Bradley Manning:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/one-hack-of-a-ride-for-angry-misfit-kid-bradley-manning/story-e6frg6so-1225966011333

Throughout, Assange has adopted a number of fanciful legal positions, not least of which is that WikiLeaks “owns” the classified cables. Lawyer and blogger David Allen Green in The New Statesman

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/02/wikileaks-legal-guardian

points out the absurdity of this claim. He suggests a suitable response might be something along “these lines”:

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/reply-given-in-arkell-v-pressdram.html.

Green really goes to town on Assange’s claim, in a Tweet, that The Guardian‘s serialisation of a book about him and WikiLeaks contains “malicious libels”. In the meantime, the suggestion by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Attorney General, Robert McClelland, that to publish these leaks is “irresponsible” and “illegal” looks toadishly lame.