Once again, the media slobbered over the latest Julian Assange
“revelation” of already public documents, while another much more
important investigation based on true reporting was largely ignored.
Michael Moynihan on how the Wikileaks founder keeps journalists dancing
to his tune—and why it’s demonstrates a worrisome trend.
Last week an organization run by a crusading Australian journalist, working in concert with mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and The Washington Post,
facilitated a series of blockbuster stories based on two million leaked
documents—an astonishing 200 gigabytes of data—detailing the secret
offshore holdings of the ultrarich.
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| Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks during a
teleconference between London and Washington on April 8, 2013 in
Washington, DC. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was on Monday to
publish more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents
from the 1970s, Julian Assange revealed. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty) |
The revelations were presented with minimal drama: no
impassioned press conferences, no suggestions of dark conspiracies, and not a
bottle-blonde megalomaniac in sight. It was a monumental leak, but missing the
now customary declaration that the leakers were upending the norms of
traditional—and institutionally corrupt—journalism. The astute reader will by
now have guessed that this crusading Australian wasn’t WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Gerard Ryle, a veteran of the Sydney Morning Herald and
The Age, is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists (ICIJ). As its name suggests, ICIJ and its media partners engaged
in old-fashioned investigative journalism; receiving documents, collating them,
and reporting them with contextual detail. The project, ICIJ says, is an investigation
into “120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and
agents” in over 170 countries.
I asked around—fellow journalists, well-informed friends,
lunkheaded acquiantances—and only a few were familiar with the ICIJ scoop,
though almost all knew of WikiLeaks’ latest “release” of documents. In a press
conference last week, the organization announced “PlusD” (also called the
“Kissinger Archive”), a massive collection of diplomatic cables from between
1973-76. It would have been quite a coup for Assange had the declassified
documents not resided on the National Archives website since 2006. Free and
available to all. As Assange acknowledges, with evasive qualification, he
merely downloaded the files from a public website, shifted them onto WikiLeaks
servers, and built a better search engine.
It’s an admirable public service, but Assange, who lards
his public pronouncements with overstatement and conspiracy, said in a
statement that the “material that we have published [sic] today is the single
most significant geopolitical publication that has ever existed.” With
WikiLeaks losing relevance since the truly significant “Cablegate” release in
2010, the organization has been beset by infighting, legal problems, and a lack
of new material.
Once said to have been rewriting the rules of journalism, Assange has
become an outlaw librarian.
Assange tweeted his thanks to those who assisted in the
“detailed covert work” of republishing the freely available cables. At a press
conference, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told reporters that the
group was making the archive “available to the general public” because they
were “hard to approach” on the National Archives website, while Assange twice
offered the rehearsed line that the files were “hidden in the borderline
between secrecy and complexity.”
Complexity. Hard to approach. Accessible to the general
public. Once said to have been rewriting the rules of journalism, Assange has
become an outlaw librarian.
Nevertheless, Salon wrote of “the latest cable leak[s]”
from the group, while writing in the same report that the documents weren’t
leaked, just “previously difficult to access.” The Guardian called the old
documents “a fresh batch of US cables published by Wikileaks.” AFP enthused
over the latest tranche of “leaked” documents. A clueless anchor on the always
clueless television station RT asked a guest, “Is there any indication yet of
who gave these documents to WikiLeaks?”
Historians, journalists, and scholars regularly use the
National Archives search engine to browse declassified material. It’s perhaps
not the smoothest browsing experience, but it didn’t take me long to find a
pile of interesting documents on the Pinochet dictatorship. Only the paranoid
would suggest that the government’s lack of technological sophistication was
deliberately obfuscatory. But an astonishing number of reporters fell for the
Assange ruse.
The Sydney Morning Herald said the material was “largely
neglected by historians, owing to the absence of an effective search engine,”
which WikiLeaks had now provided. In a typically contradictory report, Voice of
America claimed that WikiLeaks had made the “leaked US documents searchable,”
material that was once “difficult for the public to access.” Slate said the
documents weren’t “terribly easy to get” prior to the WikiLeaks rerelease,
adding an Assange-like parenthetical that this was perhaps “not entirely
accidental.” Variations of this argument were made by Der Spiegel, The Daily
Mail, The Independent, Journalism.co.uk (!), Macleans, etc.
The lazy list is depressingly long. And I suppose Assange
and I can now agree at least one point: the lamentable state of modern
journalism, where gangs of hyper-confident children churn out third-rate
content in the never-ending quest for clicks. As a result, almost every news
outlet misdescribed at least one detail of the WikiLeaks stunt.
When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
died, reporters dug into the “Kissinger Archive” in search of quick news. One
document, detailing the American government’s early assessment of Thatcher, had
“coincidentally [has] been made public on the day of her death,” said The Daily
Mail. Salon declared it “one of the early and timely gems to emerge” from the
collection. AFP marveled that “WikiLeaks reveal[ed]” the 35-year-old cable.
Well, not really. In 2007, the London Sunday Times
reprinted the cable (which, it said, had been retrieved from “the online
database of the National Archives in Washington”), as did David Torrance’s 2009
book 'We in Scotland': Thatcherism in a Cold Climate and Claire Berlinski’s
2011 biography There is No Alternative.
When The Australian headlined a story “Secrets of Gough
Whitlam era out in the open [sic] after WikiLeaks disclosures,” they were
likely unaware that one of these revelations—that Chairman Mao “confided” to
the former Australian prime minister that he was anticipating his “appointment
with God”—was discussed in Ross Terrell’s 1984 book The White-Boned Demon: A
Biography of Madame Mao Zedong.
And the most repeated quote from the archive—which was
highlighted in WikiLeaks’ press release—comes from a 1975 cable in which Henry
Kissinger jokes that “the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes
a little longer.” Salon used the Kissinger quote in a headline, adding that it
provided “an early teaser of the documents’ contents.” The Kissinger joke, The
Belfast Telegraph said, could now be read “thirty-eight years later.”
This is ignorance as revelation. In fact, the Kissinger
quote was widely known two years before the cable was produced. A 1973 article
in The New York Times quoted Kissinger saying the very same thing. You see,
Hilarious Henry used to make this “joke” quite frequently.
You see how all of this works? It’s the music impresario
“discovering” a band; they always existed, it’s just that now someone powerful
is promoting them. It’s a mixed blessing that Assange’s celebrity is provoking
journalists to do what historians have long done. Because the need to shovel
content online, often shorn of context and slotted into some ideological
philippic, will hardly stem the tide of junk history.
The good news, though, is that sequestered in the
Ecuadorian embassy, Assange is getting back to his roots. The “Kissinger
Archive” demonstrates that without Pvt. Bradley Manning, currently on trial for
providing Assange with the “Cablegate” material, the WikiLeaks impresario
hasn’t done much to “revolutionize” media. If he ever gets out of the embassy,
though, he could probably get a pretty good gig as a web developer.
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