Dude! Joe&#39;s Jottings, Mostly Junk

Completely agree. I also have a hard time with a blogger, no matter how poignant, going off on investigative journalists. There is a time and place for blogs but as one person once said, "bloggers wouldn't have broken Watergate".

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That's an often-understated point. Movable-type (the lead-and-steel kind, not the software) was the ONLY reason that Watergate was broken. It simply couldn't have been done by someone who wasn't employed by a major newspaper.

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That's what kills me about all these new media guru/evangelist types that keep predicting that blogs will be the demise of newspapers and traditional journalism. If they are, then it's a sad day for America and the world in general. We might not be reading the physical newspaper any more because we are reading it online but there will always be a need for trained journalists and "traditional" news media.

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Blogs will never fully replace the main media, though they do change the roles a bit.

Blogs can "break" a story before the media can because word-of-mouth travels fast in the blogosphere especially when twitter gets involved. it does mean a lot of false stories get around, but if the media is really paying attention, especially to the bloggers they actually hire (mind you, many of which were former journalists), they might get a crack at a good story by being able to put their full resources into research and validation.

This is the key part of the symbiotic relationship that the media can develop to blogs if they let it happen. This is increasingly necessary BECAUSE the big media corporations keep cutting back and eliminating reporters - when a big city's local paper doesn't even have a reporter for the mayor's office but instead just echoes the AP feed, you've got a problem, and that is happening EVERYWHERE. There is little investigative journalism, "traditional" journalism, going on because they don't want to pay for it.

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Blogs can also spread a story around, which can increase the clout of the media journalist that started it. The problem with this is, of course, how does the media company actually get paid for that when the article is so easily passed around for free once it is on the web at all.

BUT it does mean that the blogs can help be a filter, one more item of "search" to get to stuff that interests one. the "like everywhere" feature of FB is annoying (especially in how you can't tailor the icon to something that fits with your web page's color scheme), but it is significant in drawing more eyes back to the (online) paper than anything before it.

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;nod; my father essentially runs a blog on the politics and budget of his smallish town. he ferrets out a bunch of numbers and definitely is opinionated about what's going on; the real print newspapers have been picking up the stories (particularly re alleged corruption) and doing their own further reporting.

Edited Date: 2010-07-26 09:35 pm (UTC)

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True. But the fact that a person is a "blogger" does not mean that he or she is not a "trained journalist," or even an "investigative journalist."

Blogging is a form of communication, neither more nor less than printing a newspaper. That's the "front end," to borrow some software jargon. The investigative journalism goes on on the back end, and is entirely compatible with blogging as the mode of delivery.

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Thanks, you said what I was mulling. Yes, they had a right to release whatever they damned well pleased.

The person giving them that information certainly broke laws and acted counter to what his clearance said he was supposed to do.

And I already have a lot of problems with what gets aired, in less charged situations. E.g. I think it's quite irresponsible to announce what tactics have been used to track down those who've committed crimes or are trying to. I'd rather not know that, say, the Times Square guy was tracked down via his tracfone, as that means it can't be done again next time.

(Well, bad example. It's good to know that tracfones aren't as anonymous as one would expect, but it also means that the police job is harder next time they're trying to protect the public. In a similar vein, I remember how the guy who murdered I think Cosby's son was stupid enough to use the car phone after stealing the car. )

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The person giving them that information certainly broke laws and acted counter to what his clearance said he was supposed to do.

Maybe the person who leaked that had to deal with the conflict between following orders and their military oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, and decided that leaking it and risking their career was the best way to reveal that superiors were not doing the same.

9/11 succeeded beyond Bin Laden's wildest imaginations: it has turned us into them.

We torture. We make alliances with questionable governments. We feed our media biased information and they echo it to give the illusion of pure objectivity or even "critical analysis". We let extremist religion decide our education curriculum. We arrest our own citizens and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial. We perform show trials, and shuffle prisoners through to the court best staged to find them guilty, and if we can't find such a court, we simply don't have a trial.

And worst of all: the current administration won't prosecute the previous administrations architects of the hell I described above, because they want to be "forward looking", yet put full force attacks on the whistle blowers of that same administration that made any of that public knowledge in the first place.

Until something comes along TO WAKE PEOPLE UP TO THIS, it will never change

These media talking heads are arguing over the legality and morality of the leak AND TOTALLY IGNORING THE IMPLICATIONS OF WHAT THE DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY SAY.

THAT is mine and Meyers' point.

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FWIW, NPR didn't seem to be keeping the whole discussion on legality/morality of the leak.

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Take the concept of "morals" and shove it.

The entire damn war in its current form is immoral. The entire point of the documents released is the fact that immoral acts are being perpetrated by our government, paid for BY MY TAX DOLLARS, and the media has refused to actually bother to look at it at all. They take the scraps thrown at them like lap dogs, echo that to us, and call it "journalism", and it IS TIME FOR THAT ATTITUDE TO GO AWAY NOW.

It is NOT "right" for the media to echo to us what the government wants to say, or what the masses think they want to hear. That is cowardice, and all these talking heads were doing was coming up with excuses to defend that cowardice. They have become such experts at spin that they spin themselves into complacency and expect us to like it.

Well, I don't.

Yes, this "free speech" will have a harmful effect on those that think everything is fine and dandy.

GOOD.

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My point is, the only person talking about "freedom of speech" is you, and you're injecting that into a discussion about morals, in which it does not belong.

No one argues that the New York Times and the other news organizations which received the Wikileaks documents shouldn't have published or talked about them, and there wasn't a Pentagon Papers-like injunction wherein the government tried to muzzle them. And that's where the First Amendment begins and ends.

What you're saying is that yes, it is morally right for Wikileaks to have given those documents to the Times, and yes, it was morally right for the person who gave Wikileaks to do so, even though that was in violation of the law concerning classified documents, and worst of all (and this is also what Myers seems to be saying) that Wikileaks shouldn't have to have done it, because journalists should have been actually doing some investigation before now.

All of which I agree with.

But none of which can be supported with a simple statement of "freedom of speech."

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I echoed the first amendment because of the "freedom of the press" line, not the freedom of speech line. There are 5 items in that text, not one.

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same diff.

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actually, it isn't or else there would have been no need for the founders to differentiate.

Meyers and my point is that the media SHOULD be out there looking for stuff like this actively, not waiting for someone to hand it to them. The Constitution gives them that Right, which is why I echoed that as my "answer" to those asking what gives them the Right...

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Like I said before, of course they have a right to publish whatever they wish to.

And like Scifantasy said before, much as he agrees that they are morally correct, the constitutional right to do so has no bearing on the morality discussion.

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For these purposes there's no difference between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press."

"Freedom of the press" is not the topic you're concerned with. What you're concerned with are the obligations of the press to the public, and your perception that our current crop of press have completely failed in that obligation, by parroting official lines, by completely failing to investigate and report on problems, and by basically being a bunch of tools (http://idrewthis.org/d/20051122.html).

True or false (and I buy a lot of what you're selling, there), that has nothing to do with freedom of the press.

Edited Date: 2010-07-26 07:40 pm (UTC)

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It wasn't just that they weren't acting to that obligation, it was that they were actively questioning that obligation in the face of these documents. They were actively asking if they have the Right, when the first amendment makes it absolutely clear they have the Right.

The very fact that they were questioning the Right shows just how much of a pansy they have become.

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They weren't asking if they had the right. Whether they had the right was a legal question. They did, there's no disagreement on that point, that's the First Amendment and the Pentagon Papers.

They were asking whether it was right. A moral question.

Do not confuse the two.

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actually, the issue is that my impression from PZ's summary was that they were arguing over the legal right*.

(* with the acknowledgment that there are those, especially conservatives, that believe legal and moral rights are the same thing or should always be).

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Hm. I didn't read PZ's summary that way. I read it as the moral right.

Here's how I see the whole thing:

The New York Times had the First Amendment-guaranteed right to publish the Wikileaks documents once they had them, and the Pentagon Papers precedent (theoretically; apparently it was a factious decision) backs me up on that.

They also had the responsibility to publish, with the caveat that they actually had the responsibility to do far more. This is the obligation of the press I've been referring to, and this is the point you've been making--why did Wikileaks have to be the one doing the heavy lifting here? This is not rooted in the First Amendment but a more basic understanding of the relationship between the media and the public. This is the part that probably has my grandfather (he was a TV news producer) rolling in his grave.

Whether Wikileaks had the right to give the documents to the New York Times is slightly more shaky, but I believe it's covered under the same Pentagon Papers precedent, and that what they did was morally right and responsible as a way of getting the word out about the problems in Afghanistan.

The source who originally leaked the documents to Wikileaks (probably) broke the law, in the same way Daniel Ellsburg broke the law when he released the Pentagon Papers. However, the phrase "no jury would convict" comes to mind, because what he did was morally necessary, and sometimes, you have to take a stand. Again, morally right and responsible, though in this case a violation of the written law.

I just think it's important not to get the morality mixed up with the legal rights, because different arguments support them.

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thelongshot.livejournal.com

As someone who does work in the intelligence sector, I do have a moral problem with just releasing classified documents wholesale to the general public. To me, that's the equivalent of yelling fire in a movie theater. It is not thinking about the consequences of your actions and what it will have on those who may not be involved with any of the potential wrongdoing.

As others have said here, it also has overshadowed the actual information and continues to give bloggers the reputation of loose cannons. While the belief that big media isn't doing their jobs, it doesn't mean that the rules that journalists live by should be ignored.

Sure, those who acquire leaked information are under no obligation under the Constitution not to report it, but there needs to be some responsibility to the whole operation, and just releasing this stuff for general consumption is irresponsible, IMO.

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Here's a debate worth having. I think those are valid points, but I am more swayed by the argument that we as a society have been kept so in the dark as to the details of the Afghanistan War that we are not as outraged as we should be.

It's said that one factor contributing to the effect on the country of the Vietnam War was the way it was a "living-room war," the way we could see what was going on and realize the horrors firsthand. And maybe we need to do that here, not for blood and violence and gore, but for murky situations, back-room deals, untrustworthy allies, and especially dishonorable soldiers--to realize that we, as Americans, are perpetuating this.

The greater responsibility, in that view, would be to shine a light on the uncomfortable truths Americans have been told they don't need to think about.

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thelongshot.livejournal.com

It sounds like something different than what I was arguing...

It is an interesting dichotomy that we have right now that war doesn't affect us directly (by the country not asking its populous to sacrifice anything for a war), but we get hit indirectly by it with probably more direct pictures from the war.

The problem is, war is never pretty, and it is something we shouldn't enter into lightly. That's why I had serious reservations about Iraq. There are certainly questions about how much we are doing in Afghanistan, tho making an unstable region more stable would work into the plan. Course, if the real problem is Pakistan, I don't know if it will have the effect we as a country want.

In any case, I'm not sure this argument has much to do with the OP.

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I disagree that these are different arguments.

You have the opinion that it was morally wrong to release the documents because they are dangerous, in the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" sense. I'm saying that, in the words of the Smothers Brothers, "I yelled 'fire' because no one would save me if I yelled 'CHOCOLATE!'"

That is, in order to draw attention to a problem, we have to get the public's attention. It's a risk, but one I believe was necessary to take to fix a large problem. I see the original leaker, Wikileaks, and the Times all as doing the morally right thing.

Joe, I think, agrees with me. He also thinks (as do I, and as do you) that there was a legal right on the part of the Times to publish the documents.

I originally got involved only to argue that the support for the legal right was not the support for the moral right. That's because I read the OP as arguing that "freedom of the press" justified the moral right.

But it's all tied in together.

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i'm not so sure on the "more direct pictures" - in today's society with dvd players, ipods, and 57 channels with nothing on (and that's just the hi-def set), it actually is very easy to avoid the war, especially visually, than it was for the mentioned 'Nam conflict.

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heh - in my opinion, one problem with the Viet Nam war was how much we DIDN'T know what was going on in spite of all of that media. The media presented too much raw data and not nearly enough commentary that could be accurately defended without accusations of political bias. As such, we knew an awful lot, but had no idea what it really meant.

and that is, of course, much the same today with economic news. we get zillions of bits of "data" every day, this report, that report, these statistics, those statistics, this corporate CEO was on capital hill in front of this committee and said this stuff, but none of it MEANS anything because the real commentary cant' be presented without the curse of political bias accusations, so the media simply avoids the topic and the "informed" people are no more informed after a day's news than they were before it.

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On the one hand, I agree with you but I think there is a difference between shining a light on uncomfortable truths and leaking a bunch of classified documents. Like thelongshot, I worked with the military and with guys that had been over to Afghanistan and Iraq. They have very different pictures of what is going on than what the media is portraying. Are they right? Is the media right? I think somewhere in the middle, there is the truth. What is happening is that stories are leaked by people who know nothing about the military nor military operations and situations get completely twisted around or misrepresented.

For example, during the fall of Baghdad, there was an incident where unarmed reporters were shot on a rooftop by US soldiers that was blasted all over the news. Major outrage from the US. It looked very bad from a civilian/non-military perspective. My military co-workers reaction was that the reporters' telephoto lens looked like an RPG and the soldiers shot at them in self-defense. It was an unfortunately accident. Why didn't the soldiers double-check? In that situation, you can't. One second can mean your life or theirs. The soldiers are always going to chose their own life or to protect their squad in that situation as all of them have known someone who hesitated and was killed. It is stories like this one that make me question every "leaked" piece of information and knee-jerk reaction from the press and the public. There are always two sides to each story and more information that isn't released or known at the time than is.

Lastly, for national security and personal security of the men and women serving over in Iraq and Afghanistan, the public will always be somewhat in the dark. If the most recent leak leads to increased violence against our forces over there, I want Wikileaks to be prosecuted for incentment to violence/assault and murder.

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the leak is not going to lead to increased violence against our forces. you can't get more aggressive against us than the enemies already are. What would or could they do, other than paste it on Al Jazeera where nobody would know if it was true or the lies they already tell, and when most in Afghanistan don't even have a TV set or live near a broadcaster? When the enemy already lies about our actions and intentions to the people through the limited media they have, what difference would the truth make?

if the leak or any leak (like say the leaks that broke the Iraq prison torture story) actually led to, say, a legitimate war crimes trial (not that America ever has any interest in following international law on that front), would you want Wikileaks prosecuted?

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do keep in mind that wikileaks didn't just dump this (and not just because, as one article put it that it keeps the "value" of the story up there due to the exclusive nature of it). they gave it to credible news organizations that have covered the wars in detail, and know how to filter through the material so that the sensitive stuff that IS risky to the current troops stays out. The story is not the picky details - if it was, they wouldn't need a whole 91,000 of these damn things, as just 2 or 3 would be inflammatory enough. the story is the trend.

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thelongshot.livejournal.com

For all of that, it didn't seem to say anything more than what Rachael Maddow's trip to Afghanistan said, other than give some written proof.

What is more troubling is that this stuff can be had out there. While I appreciate that wikileaks is doing some redacting, I don't know if they know what they should or should not be redacting. Also, there are going to be others who aren't going to take as much care with the information.

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On the one hand, I agree with you but I think there is a difference between shining a light on uncomfortable truths and leaking a bunch of classified documents.
Well, there can be. Of course, if the government's response to uncomfortable truths is to stamp them "classified" (which it has been, to varying degrees, under every administration at least since the Cold War began), then that line blurs quite a bit.

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There are various levels of "classified".Unless they have been cleared for release, they're automatically at least FOUO "For Official Use Only", which would still make them not for public consumption.

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You're presuming your conclusion.

Whether documents are classified is a distinct question from whether they reasonably need to be classified. (And a further distinction from what LEVEL of classification applies.[1])

If it were the case that only documents that posed a security risk were classified, then release of those documents would be inappropriate. But in fact, classification is applied FAR more broadly than that, and includes an enormous number of documents that pose a risk only of official embarassment.

Those incorrectly classified documents SHOULD be released; indeed, we should have a government agency staffed by independent people with appropriate clearance whose sole job it is to promptly declassify documents that have been improperly classified. No such department exists, meaning that a person with access to an embarassing but harmless document that is, but should not be, classified, has to risk prosecution in order to "shine a light on uncomfortable truths."

[1] An etymological aside: I assume the use of "classified" to mean "confidential" comes from some WWII or Cold War shorthand for "classified as not for public release" or some such?

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and read my comment above concerning the law.

when someone's oath to the constitution (which all military people swear) conflicts with orders given by someone who does not care about that oath, a "leak" is the one of the best ways to deal with it.

if orders and "law" were morally more important than the constitution, there never would have been a "Deep Throat" 38 years ago.

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