"WikiLeaks: Sells Newspapers - Indicative of a Changing Culture"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“WikiLeaks: Sells Newspapers – Indicative of a Changing Culture”

December 1, 2010

The New York Times exculpation, in their lead editorial yesterday, for printing the WikiLeaks documents manifests a disregard for the trust needed for states to maintain smooth international relations. The Administration’s State Department, led by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, is doing their utmost to control the damage. Robert Gibbs said the people who released the cables were “criminals, first and foremost.” Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. was looking to prosecute those deemed responsible. The President has condemned the theft and the publishing of the extracts.

The paper’s supercilious fawning is Uriah Heep-like. In an obvious bid to remain within the good graces of the Obama Administration, they write of the lack of “skullduggery” in the current administration and contrast it to the Bush administration: “After years of revelations about the Bush administration’s abuses – including the use of torture and kidnappings – much of the Obama administration’s diplomatic wheeling and dealing is appropriate and, at times, downright skillful.”

The fact that none of the quarter million cables released were classified “top secret” and that only six percent were classified “secret” does not excuse the release, or the publication, of conversations that can be construed as embarrassing, at a minimum. Respect, decency and commonsense should have precluded such publication. The ubiquity of the internet and especially You-Tube suggests diplomats, and others, will be far less forthcoming in future dialogues with their compatriots from other countries and among themselves. Discretion, when talking about others, is always advisable, but frankness, in private, is necessary to solidify relationships. Common sense suggests those conversations should be held private. In a facetious and timely obituary, allegedly printed in the London Times, the death of Common Sense is mourned: “Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason. He is survived by his four stepbrothers: I know My Rights; I Want It Now; Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim.”

David Brooks, in an op-ed opposite the Times editorial, suggested the paper should have considered one additional filter. “Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.” The publication of WikiLeaks documents will damage our global conversations and for that the Times should take their share of responsibility and not proffer explanations. We all live more civilly (if innocently) for not knowing what people say about us when our backs are turned.

It is not that the New York Times is so high minded that they report all leaks. They make editorial decisions. For example, they declined to publish the “ClimateGate” e-mails that emerged from the University of East Anglia last November (other than excerpts from fourteen e-mails), presumably because the conclusions reached did not accord to their own preconceptions about global warming. The Times noted, at the time: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted.” Apparently those same standards did not apply to the WikiLeaks documents. It is obvious that “all the news that’s fit to print” in the New York Times must conform to the publisher’s political agenda.

The leaking of the tapes and documents does not imperil the United States; it simply makes the job of the President and the jobs of those in the diplomatic corps more difficult. Julian Assange is no hero. Had he been born in Russia or China he would be no more. An accident would have occurred. He was fortunate to have been born in Australia, a country of laws that protect even the most deranged. As Fouad Ajami writes in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Assange feeds off the taste for high gossip. Doubtless, he sees himself as truth-teller at war with an American ‘empire’ with a lot to hide…he communicates [with] a love of the limelight that is of a piece with this time when all discretion and privacy are now things of the past.”

The internet has meant that we all live in a fishbowl. GPS’s in our cell phones mean that we can be tracked no matter where we are. Easy Pass and credit cards know our whereabouts. The Wall Street Journal, in a front page article today, writes about BlueCava Inc., a new company that intends “to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.” Webcams and streaming video cameras bring distant events to our PDA’s, as they occur. We are always in the “loop.” The ability to disappear, ala Jack Reacher, is the stuff of fiction, not reality. Everything one says and every act one performs may be recorded for posterity, thereby limiting the free flow of ideas. When the last vestiges of discretion are violated, those disclosures only serve to inhibit trust and communication. No one is served, other than the fame accrued to the thief, in the case of Mr. Assange. Freedom of the press, which is protected by the First Amendment, historically implied some publishing self-restraint. No more. Newspapers now print what they want and withhold what they choose, in conformance with their political beliefs. And “Big Brother” looms overhead.

WikiLeaks is, in fact, representative of a changing culture. Julian Assange did not initiate this unfortunate trend; he has aggravated it. We must accept that we are living in a time and place when the title of Robert O’Harrow’s 2005 book is especially pertinent: No Place to Hide.