What Is It Good For?
by digby
This story about the ongoing journalistic malpractice involved in the reporting on the Wikileaks cables from Columbia Journalism Review sheds some light on just how lazy/corrupt/inept much of journalism has become. (Perhaps it’s always been this way, but I think we can definitively say that it’s not improving.)
The reveal the confusion and misinformation that’s characterized the recent reporting on the release of the cables, in all the ways we’ve discussed here from the beginning. The fact that many continue to insist that all 260,000 cables were indiscriminately dumped is bad enough. That’s just simple misinformation at this point. But it turns out there is something more subtle — and insidious — at work. For instance:
Greg Brock, a senior editor who oversees corrections at The New York Times, told me the paper is in possession of all 250,000 cables, which means it’s technically correct if it says the documents have been released (as in released to the Times). He also pointed to several examples where the paper was delicate in its descriptions of the documents, such as this …
[Assange’s] incarceration has not stanched the controversial flow of classified American documents from WikiLeaks, the most recent drawn from some 250,000 diplomatic cables, mostly between American diplomats abroad and the State Department in Washington.
That said, Brock agrees the language being used by many media outlets is problematic, if not wholly incorrect. “I think you’re correct that the language being used causes the confusion,” he said in an e-mail. “‘Released’ means different things to different readers. But I think the average person would take that to mean released ‘publicly.’ But they did ‘release’ them to several news organizations.”
Well, duh. Of course people are going to assume that “released” means released to the public — particularly since the media generally have been telling them so for weeks! In fact, it’s so misleading that I have a hard time believing they actually meant “released to to media outlets.” It’s absurd on its face.
Getting this straight is not that hard. Neither is the fact that Wikileaks have been working together with major newspapers around the world to vet these cables before publishing, another fact which seems to elude most of the media. I don’t know why they can’t seem to do it, but at this point I don’t think it’s reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are either lazy incompetents who can’t be trusted to report yesterday’s weather or they are purposefully misleading their readers.
And that’s the most amazing thing about all this. If they cannot be trusted to even get the Wikileaks story right on basic facts — how in the hell can we trust them to get anything right? Don’t they understand how damaging to their credibility this is? Don’t they see that they are making Wikileaks’ case for them? If the implications of all this weren’t so serious, I’d think it was some kind of elaborate joke.
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