WikiLeaks, Morgan Tsvangirai and the Guardian – an explanation
For the sake of accuracy, it was the theguardian.co.uk who first released the Morgan Tsvangirai cables, not wikileaks.
Corections have been made by theguardian, and a few media who published the story.
Last week, Comment is Free published a piece by James Richardson claiming that WikiLeaks had put Zimbabwean prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, at risk by releasing a US diplomatic cable that showed he had been privately urging Washington to maintain sanctions against Harare, while taking the opposite position in public. WikiLeaks and some commentators suggested this was unfair because it was the Guardian, rather than WikiLeaks, which took the decision to publish the document.
They had a point. On Tuesday, the piece was amended to reflect the Guardian’s role in putting the document into the public domain, and an explanatory note added. We should have done that quicker but the readers’ editor, our usual channel for corrections, had not received any complaint. Some critics saw malice in the publication of the Richardson piece in the first place: why would the Guardian point the finger at WikiLeaks knowing it had published the cable? In fact, neither Richardson, a first-time contributor to our comment website, nor the US-based editor who handled it, were aware of the somewhat complicated process through which (most) cables were published. The piece was posted on the bank holiday after Christmas. The Guardian’s WikiLeaks editing team was not around. They were taking a well-earned break after months of working on the documents.
