With all the talk about WikiLeaks, I almost feel guilty adding to the heap, but I've had some interesting discussions over the last couple of days and thought I might share them.
When I heard the announcement last week that we should be expecting another major WikiLeaks unveiling, I started bracing myself for the oscillating reactions between those who say that it puts our service members (and others) at risk and those who say there's nothing we didn't already know.
And then there are those who fit in the special category of the split personality who make both claims at the same time. I think of Max Boot writing at Commentary who wrote a couple of days ago:
I risk sounding like a stuffy, striped-pants diplomat myself if I say that the conduct of all concerned is reprehensible and beneath contempt. But that’s what it is, especially because the news value of the leaks is once again negligible. As with the previous releases of military reports, the WikiLeaks files only fill in details about what has generally already been known. Those details have the potential to cause acute embarrassment — or even end the lives of — those who have communicated with American soldiers or officials, but they do little to help the general public to understand what’s going on.
In the last WikiLeaks episode, Jonah Goldberg lamented that nobody had assassinated Assange. This time around, I imagine others will hope a death wish upon him.
Heritage Foundation senior fellow James Carafano may not wish death on Assange, but he wants something to be done and for the United States to stop getting "cyberscrewed" by WikiLeaks whose mission, according to Carafano, has become "embarrassing and weakening America."
I've found this a strange reaction. Carafano speaks as though Assange has a duty to the United States to not 'embarrass and weaken' it.
My other concern is the now common reference to WikiLeaks and their activity as investigative journalism. It's clear that lots of things have changed forever because of the WikiLeaks episodes, but how ever significant those changes might be, we should not confuse it for investigative journalism.
Friend and brilliant fellow investigative journalist Lindsay Beyerstein pointed out that WikiLeaks says it plays an important role in authenticating documents. As somebody who spends a significant amount of time tracing documents to make sure they came from the place somebody claimed, I'm grateful there is an organization out there doing just that (although, it does come at the expense of losing exclusivity). But I'm still not willing to count that as investigative journalism. WikiLeaks may serve important roles such as authenticating and curating, but it doesn't contextualize, evaluate, make connections and tell the stories of what documents mean.
But more importantly, I'm worried about what this says about the state of investigative journalism if a dump of 250,000 documents is considered investigative journalism. While there are many good avenues to read good investigative work, there are more that have disappeared either because of publications cutting their investigative budgets or because of publications closing altogether.
The result? WikiLeaks is investigative journalism in the eyes of too many.
And that makes me nervous.
Allen McDuffee is a political reporter, investigative journalist and blogger. From 2011 to 2013 he covered policy, politics, ideas and think tanks for The Washington Post and has also written for The Nation, The American Prospect, Huffington Post and New York Observer, among others.
