Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy
Organisation:
The New York Times is one of the five leading newspapers that have been working closely with WikiLeaks. It has just published an e-book about its six months of stormy relations with the whistleblowing website’s founder, Julian Assange, and the release of its leaked documents.
Open Secrets offers unique insights into the world of US diplomacy and international relations while at the same time shedding light on the innermost workings of journalism and the difficulties of handling sources. In an account of his contacts with Assange, executive editor chef Bill Keller describes him as capricious and unstable, if not paranoid.
$5.99 e-book, January 2011, The New York Times Company, English
Quotes
"From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk." “Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say ‘a source, pure and simple,’ because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it.” “I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.” “And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.”
"From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk." “Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say ‘a source, pure and simple,’ because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it.” “I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.” “And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.”
Published on
Updated on
25.01.2016
