Wikileaks as a Gift, Not Threat, to Journalism
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 7 2010
By now, there's a good chance that you've seen that Wikileaks video showing a 2007 U.S. military attack in New Baghdad that killed two employees of the Reuters news services along with about ten other people, an attack that the Pentagon has portrayed as a military engagement with Iraqi insurgents. In fact, since Wikileaks posted a copy of the video that they reported they got from government sources, it's been viewed on YouTube alone more than 3.6 million times. In four days. That's fairly amazing.
But one thing to keep in mind here is that Wikileaks' tragic footage is a document; it's not news.
News requires some amount of perspective, context. The problem with seeing this admittedly horrific episode in the Iraq war ripped from its moorings is that the average American news consumer, at least, has been very little prepared to make sense of what it all means, even after seven years of war in Iraq. Is what we're watching an aberration? Is this a normal Tuesday in Baghdad? The function of a journalistic class is to help citizens make sense of the world, a world that grows ever more confounding every day, especially as we see more of it, in real-time and often in living color. (Not for nothing is the site called Wikileaks, as in collaboration.) As the web made it easier and easier for everyone to collect and distribute bits of information, the American news world has floundered. CNN has been a subject of discussion of late for its failings, and it in particular seems to be a poster child for an approach to the changing news business that looks at the democratization of the ability to gather information and says, Well clearly, we must do more and more of it! We all know pretty well how that approach is working out.
The alternative for journalists not afraid of the future is to look at Wikileaks not as a competitor or their replacement, but as an amazing resource of historic possibility. Wikileaks' video footage that seems to sum up all that is confusing and horrifying about modern war isn't a threat to journalists. It should be looked upon as manna from heaven.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald has more along these lines.
[Micah adds:] One additional wrinkle to consider: the "Collateral Murder" video is being viewed all over the world right now, and as this useful infographic from its YouTube page shows, it's popular in a wide range of countries and regions, including all of Latin and South America, Europe, Russia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and a smattering of African countries including Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria :
