re: #23 Barrett Brown

I was referring to your claim that it is Assange and Wikileaks who have caused the tendency of the media to focus on personality, which is something for which I have seen no evidence.

You don’t think you have seen any evidence that Assange enjoys the limelight on Wikileaks, that he’s exerted an amount of control that had made others on the project deeply annoyed, etc.?

In order to do what you seem to want them to do in terms of ensuring that the media focuses on the important ones - something they have been disinclined to do anyway in regards to a great number of tremendously stories that have come out without involvement from Wikileaks - they would have to extend this release over a period of years.

I actually shouldn’t have been talking about the media focusing on it, but people focusing on it. Given that your claim is that Wikileaks represents something that will be effective even with a moribund media, the efficacy of Wikileaks at getting stories into the media is semi-moot. The measurement is how well Wikileaks gets the story into the minds of the public. You’ve very rightly acknowledged that the ideological bent of Wikileaks shown in the edited video is something that harms this new institutions credibility and effectiveness; I’m saying that its release of tons of stuff that’s pure drivel and gossip is also harmful in the same way.

They do it like this because it is better to have access to information about the actual geopolitical situation sooner rather than later, and thus they had to strike a medium between releasing it in such a way that one can follow it - and I haven’t had any problems following the major revelations despite being a single person as opposed to a news station with a budget in the tens of millions - and releasing it in such a way as that it can be considered and acted upon in a timely manner by the world’s citizenry.

I don’t see any such balance being struck, though. I think, with journalism, that making good representative cases is more important than making every case. I think Wikileaks isn’t even making any cases; they’re simply publishing information with a sort of ‘hint hint’ attitude, leaving the public to make up their own minds. I do not think the public, the one we actually have, is going to be able to pick and choose the important information from this glut and act on it. I think the job of the journalist— one thing the media is failing so badly on right now— is to highlight the important stories in a way that makes them relevant.

And one final thought— how many 4channers and Anons do you think give a shit about Nigeria?