A Thoroughly Modern Debate in a Thoroughly Antiquated Congress
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 28 2010
So, I was reading this Dana Milbank piece about how debate on the House floor yesterday afternoon was consumed with discussion of the 92,000 documents released by the website Wikileaks on the execution of the war in Afghanistan. Milbank has some fun with members casually dropping references to "the Wikileaks Report" and "the Wikileaks expose."
And I thought to myself, "Self, you know what might be fun? Pulling up the Congressional Record. Digging through it to see just many and what kind of mentions about Wikileaks there have been this week in Congress. Why? Because this is a website few people had heard of until a few months ago, one that's run by a non-American citizen, hosted on servers outside the United States. Wikileaks' ability to shape the debate in the U.S. Congress raises all sorts of fascinating new questions about the ability of a single person or small group of people to, as Margaret Mead famously said, change the world."
"Why, reading our nation's official record of what actually came out of the mouths of our elected officials," I went on, "might provide some insight whether the Wikileaks document release is less important as an exposing of new important than it is as a catalyzing moment. The importance of the cache of materials is not that it sheds new lights on Predator strikes or the duplicity of our allies. Instead, the power of Wikileaks in this instance is as , to use a modern phrase, as an aggregator, using sheer volume to break through the clutter of the modern media environment and capture even the attention of Congress."
I had myself intrigued. Hooked. Wanting to know more. So what, then, does the Congressional Record, the official recording of what happens in our names in Congress every day, the source material to our democracy, reveal about the ability of the "world's first stateless news organization" Wikileaks to drive debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives? Dunno. The Government Printing Office website keeps timing out when I try to access yesterday's Congressional Record. Not exactly confidence-inspiring about the country's ability to meet the complex challenges and threats of the future. But if it makes the federal government of the United States of America feel better, Wikileaks.org has had trouble staying up lately, too.