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If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

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Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#21

Post by grandalf »

vph wrote: post #2

Reading this article several times, I really failed to see a clear logic from the author as to why the supposed dying of Wikileaks is the NYT's fault.

[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than simply downvote?]

In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom.

It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs and desire to please those with political power.

Think about when the last time the NY Times published any remotely controversial investigative journalism... oh yeah it was the articles that supported the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Strangely, the Times (a good but ardently neoconservative) paper still manages to fool progressives into thinking that it offers a sympathetic voice. Sadly the pressures of competing in the online world have left the paper with no choice but to sell off its journalistic integrity year after year.

If anything, one would hope that a paper like the Times would have taken a skeptical but journalistically sharp look at the leaked info and would have held off on the ad hominem attack on the Wikileaks founder, at least until some evidence was offered in support of the allegations against him.

And no, I don't think the total buffoonery written by Krugman, Dowd, and Herbert counts for any progressiveness points. If anything the three are a sideshow act with no relevance to the issues that matter.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#22

Post by lotharbot »

bandushrew wrote: post #6
ars wrote: post #4

"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection" No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information. It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself. I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up. This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange d…

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection. We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like. What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileak…

> "WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity"

WL and its supporters like to call it an "intelligence agency" (Assange himself has said this). That's more than just a "journalistic entity".

Why is anyone surprised when various governments treat WL like an intelligence agency?

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#23

Post by asdfasdghasdf »

lukejduncan wrote: post #20
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the people among us who don't think that Wikileaks is a good thing to support? What if there are more people who think that than message board sentiment analysis would lead you to believe? What if the New York Times simply doesn't agree with your take --- ok, the popular take on places like HN --- about Wikileaks?

Does it matter if anyone thinks WikiLeaks is a "good" thing? These are the questions that matter: Is WikiLeaks a journalistic entity? Why or why not? Is it OK for a bank/financial entity to block donations to any entity, journalism or not? *If money is speech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo ) how is blocking donations not a criminal offence? "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend t…

Because Visa and Mastercard are private companies that can decide whom they want or don't want as customers. They'll deny you from being a merchant if you have poor credit, too. They take on risk with every new merchant they accept, and I can see how WikiLeaks might pose a greater risk than most. If a group's supporters are willing to DoS visa.com and mastercard.com, I wouldn't put it past them to make large donations with stolen credit card numbers either, and Visa and Mastercard are on the hook for the chargebacks.

And, of course, since money is speech, it's fully within your rights to donate to wikileaks (cash, check, wire transfer, money order), just as its within Visa's rights not to accept Wikileaks as a customer.

EDIT: And just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that there are no political motivations behind the decisions of Visa and Mastercard. I'm just answering the question about why this isn't for some reason illegal.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#24

Post by ternaryoperator »

There will be many causes for Wikileaks' death (if in fact it does in fact die). None more damaging though than the damage Wikileaks did to itself. Leaving unredacted the names of informants who were later executed for providing the very information Wikileaks posted clinched its fate IMO.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#25

Post by X-Istence »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #24

There will be many causes for Wikileaks' death (if in fact it does in fact die). None more damaging though than the damage Wikileaks did to itself. Leaving unredacted the names of informants who were later executed for providing the very information Wikileaks posted clinched its fate IMO.

[citation needed]

I haven't read any information regarding sources being executed.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#26

Post by vph »

tptacek wrote: post #13
mindslight wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information. If the NYT meets the standards of "journalism", Wikileaks sure as hell does. Better to accidentally release unredacted information than the government sanitized press releases of the NYT. > It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself. Is this not a big part of the campaign to discredit Wikileaks? Focus on the person to hide…

When people say the New York Times does "journalism", one of the unspoken connotations of that is that they are paying actual highly-qualified people to travel across the world, often into war zones and scenes of chaos and disaster, to record and report events firsthand. It is awfully hard to even formulate an argument that the New York Times isn't a journalistic organization. On the other hand, it is not as difficul…

Certainly. It's really laughable that people put Wikileaks at the same level as the NYT. Really. You might recall not too long ago, a Wikileak cofounder took off and decided to destroy all the data he had beyond recovery. What happened after that then? Nothing. Imagine if a NYT editor did something of similar magnitude.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#27

Post by starwed »

grandalf wrote: post #21
vph wrote: post #2

Reading this article several times, I really failed to see a clear logic from the author as to why the supposed dying of Wikileaks is the NYT's fault.

[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than simply downvote?] In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom. It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs an…

You're downvoted for pretending controversial opinions (that the nytimes is a neoconservative stronghold) are obvious and need no justification.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#28

Post by asdfasdghasdf »

bandushrew wrote: post #6
ars wrote: post #4

"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection" No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information. It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself. I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up. This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange d…

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection. We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like. What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileak…

I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't).

Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the embassy cable leak (http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html). Of course, they haven't done anything interesting since then, either. Look at their own charts, and you see that their income is heavily correlated with major releases (etc. Collateral Murder in April, Embassy cables in December) and their current donations don't look that far removed from, say, September or May 2010.

Even their own financial statements (http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-Projekt04_de...) say that most of their money came wire transfer (which is still possible and fully legal). This is definitely more an issue of people not wanting to donate than it is being not able to. Obviously, the best way to raise more funds would be to do more high-profile work; WikiLeaks is choosing to shut down all their high profile work.

You say the government shut them down, but in fact they shut themselves down, as your parent comment mentions. They shut down their super-useful, award-winning site (eventually to be put back up as a read-only archive at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks) and re-purposed themselves entirely to hyping up the five things they got from Brad Manning. Now, they're out of money, they're out of juicy Brad Manning leaks, they haven't even been accepting anything new since they shut themselves down, and so they're gonna drum up their little government-conspiracy thing that they do very, very well, to try to raise some more money.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#29

Post by bandushrew »

asdfasdghasdf wrote: post #28
bandushrew wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection. We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like. What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileak…

I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't). Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the…

So your argument is that the arrest and ongoing prosecution of Assange(sp?), the shutdown of services from paypal++, visa, master card, bank of america, Western Union and Amazon had pretty much no noticeable effect on donations, was not the result of a coordinated effort by the US government and the real reason donations are down is because they haven't released any more leaks?

sounds entirely plausible to me. would you like to buy a bridge?

++Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account.

Re: If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

#30

Post by [deleted] »

asdfasdghasdf wrote: post #28
bandushrew wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection. We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like. What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo. Lots of mumbling about how wikileak…

I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't). Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the…

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