Why The Nature of Journalism Matters for Our Wired State

Here's my debate with Robert Wright on Blogging Heads.

Some interesting discussion on these questions:

o whether the nature of the journalism matters or how you got the documents finally "sanitized" by journalistic judgement -- Wright doesn't think so, I do

o whether Bush's wiretapping and the complicity of telecoms is something we should be more indignant about than WikiLeaks hacking and publication of secret documents (because it's a state and non-state). And here I'm not willing to say "Oh, yes, it is". That is, I can certainly condemn Bush's wiretapping and telecoms, if you can illustrate to me that there was really no compelling "clear and present danger" type of problem (it appears to have been overbroad). To be sure, Wright put this in terms of trying to goad me into saying (because he admitted he thought I would naturally believe this!) that I thought it would be "ok" for the government to hack WikiLeaks, but "not ok" for WikiLeaks to hack the government.

But guess what -- both are wrong, because the method is wrong. However, having said that, I will then not rush to the next conclusion - as the anti-Americans and leftists will -- and say "therefore, the government hacking WikiLeaks is worse, because it's a state, and might succeed".

What I won't concede (and I'm not sure Wright has a context of thinking about state/non-state actors such as at the UN that I have ) -- is that non-state actors, just because they are non-state and therefore don't have the power (ostensibly) of the state are somehow more of a victim when they are hacked by U.S. intelligence in a cyberwar, than Mastercard is a victim when their script kiddie friends hack them. Oh, no. I will definitely not concede that because I think we are already rapidly moving to a Snowcrash situation where the U.S. is getting to be merely a glorified post office (that can't even hang on to its mail) and the stateless, that is to say, the new Wired State, is taking over with frightening rapidity -- the power Assange has to leak government secrets; the power Anon has to leak the secrets of Gawker.com customers because Gawker.com criticized 4chan's methods -- that power is a greater power now than any state, and we are only seeing just the beginning.

o whether the lunch-counter sit-in had to be civil disobedience precisely because the larger community of the South would not have ever recognized what would later become established rights for blacks, and that therefore that is what is required now with the DDOS or the entire WikiLeaks operation, i.e. the nature of the problem of U.S. government secrecy is so terrible that unlawful methods have to be used to bless it -- I certainly don't think so, and Bob Wright seems to condemn it, but he seems particularly animated about showing that "civil disobedience is needed" for some immoral situations.

I'm not willing to say that the U.S. role in the world is such a compelling reason for civil disobedience -- whether peaceful or violent. And that's because I challenge the left with their facile explanations about two wars "started because of lies," because the forces the U.S. is fighting --  terrorists and extremist militants -- are the ones killing the overwhelming majority of people. Terrorists blew up people in Iran this week; in Iraq in past weeks -- hundreds of people slaughtered just in the period of the WikiLeaks sagas, and not a single U.S. soldier to be blamed. If someone thinks magically that this will "stop" if you withdraw troops, you aren't understanding the complexities of what drew the U.S. there in the first place. You can surely argue that the U.S. shouldn't go around the world trumping up excuses to invade countries and step on hornets' nests that will wind up killing hundreds of thousands of locals -- I'm all for that.

But then...what is the plan to stop tyranny and terrorism in these regions? There is this frightful American exceptionalism in reverse that the left suffers from -- implying that if only the U.S. becomes good, stops "lying about two wars," and withdraws from the fighting of insurgents, that everything will go well. I disagree. I think a "domino theory" in Central Asia, the resurgence of Russia and then its conflict with China, and the loss of Israel in the Middle East to the triumphalism of Palestinians and their Arab backers  are all really awful things that really spell a frightening New World Order that isn't free -- and those would be the consequences.

(I think people have REALLY short memories about Afghanistan as well: the Soviets killed one million civilians and lost only 15,000 of their own men, not because the local fighters of that era threatened the spread of terrorism or fundamental Islam, but because they weren't willing to follow an imposed Communist government. I reject the claim that the U.S. "created the Taliban". The U.S. funded the mujahedin for its own geopolitical reasons of fighting the Cold War, but the Soviets created them -- and later, their forcing a generation of young men into refugee camps in Pakistan where they then studied, fatherless, in madrassahs, was a key factor in "creating the Taliban" that the left isn't willing to look at. If you are going to posit theories about how America's wars "create" insurgencies that wouldn't have been there, at least have the intellectual honesty to flip the history book back a few more decades and see how the Soviets -- and they backed Saddam in Iraq, too -- helped create those insurgents in the first place.)

o The question of shared context, if we are indeed, going to struggle against "The Society of the Spectacle" (see, I'm not willing to be defeatist like Guy Debord, and stay drunk in a cafe for 30 years and then commit suicide -- I'm not willing to suffer the victimhood or enjoy the glamour, as he did, of these insights he had -- I think you should still act morally anyway.)

The lunch-counter protests that spread to thousands of people could reach a point where "everybody saw" their cause as just. (Again, not many Southern whites, but the people inside their movement, the larger U.S. public, and ultimately, the U.S. public today, looking back in time -- most people would find their cause just.) Their faces were known, their names were known, their methods peaceful.

Not so WikiLeaks. Besides the face of Assange, an anarchist sectarian freak, and his confreres with no names in the operation, and his forking former-friends and now-irate lovers, what can we see and know? What are we "supposed" to believe about this "world view" that seems mainly about sticking it to America?

Robert Wright is a journalist, and I'm a human rights activist and chronicler of events in social movements and that is basically the difference in our perspectives. I work as a news writer and journalist, too, but I've never really sought to become a professional journalist.

There were two reasons in life why I didn't go into journalism, a field I admire and interact with, but criticize. The first was when I was very young, 21 years old, working at my first job at Freedom House, assisting a magazine of translations from samizdat and other publications, occasionally writing articles and book reviews for the small magazines of that era.  And I really didn't like a feature of this process that's hard to explain, but was fundamental for me: I didn't like the feeling that I was just collating and cobbling and recycling the ideas and information of other people. I felt that somehow, as I had to keep to the "line" of this or that journal, that it was very hard to keep and express my own original thoughts. I always consciously felt as I wrote each line that this was "coming from" somewhere else.

I realize as I got into it that everyone else was content with that process, that if there was an actual quote, sure, they'd put it in quotation marks, but as I saw their writing and struggled with my own, I felt as if each and every line should have been hyperlinked (to interpolate a metaphor from a later era) to show its source in another person, book, magazine.

One of the reasons I find Guy Debord fascinating, although I don't at all like his politics or methods, is because he's a brilliant and original thinker, not a derivative, even though, of course, you can find derivations of Lenin and Marx and all the French philosophers woven into his work, but his thinking is startling. I thought E.P. Thompson, writer of classic work The Making of the British Working Class  and European anti-nuclear campaigner was also such a thinker, and while I am not a socialist, I greatly admired the type of socialism he espoused.

What I like about blogging versus journalism is that it's much easier to show the transparent process of how you got a thought or news from another person with the hyperlink and put in the quote blocks more easily -- there's something about the journalism sausage-making that removes that process even though mainstream newspapers are now hyperliking more.

The other thing I didn't like about journalism when I worked with TV networks as a translator and fixer in Moscow for some years was that I had to do really immoral things that really left me queasy. For example, I had to pay $100 to a wealthy son of a Party official who spoke good English to come and speak about bread lines after the price hikes because they needed a Russian in a hurry -- such "location fees" and "consulting fees" unfortunately a part of the business in a place like Russia.

More than that, I found it horrible to go to the family members of a murder victim and stick a microphone in their face and ask them how they "feel".  I remember once when the TV crew went to the home of the husband of a police woman who had been murdered to see how he "felt," and I found myself refusing to help with this, and sat in the van, looking out at the dead woman's little girl swinging on a swingset -- Russian-style, they had not told her that her mother was never coming back. Journalism is a pretty nasty business -- a cameraman once told me frankly that they had to exaggerate reality they filmed in order to "get it to come out right the way people expect it."

This isn't to say that people who chose journalism as a profession are immoral -- obviously there are many moral journalists who win prizes. But for me, there was a threshold of conscience that I just couldn't cross because I am too provincial. I personally as a human being found that I couldn't go up to a man whose wife was murdered and ask him "how he felt" when I would not be there the next day as a neighbour or parishioner to also bring him some meatloaf or babysit his daughter -- there's something about the divorcing of the media from the community that always made me queasy.

To be sure, it's important that  professional journalists briskly overcome that reticence -- maybe it's the product of being from a small town -- or none of us would ever know the things "the public has a right to know" about murders of police women by 17-year-old juvenile delinquents, in this case a kid who had stolen hubcabs and in Russia, got put in jail for two years, which was excessive punishment and led to this tragic backlash. On balance, it was better that we made this film that not, although along the way, the intrusion and shortcuts that had to happen troubled me.

Or once I was covering a giant demonstration in Moscow, hundreds of thousands of people, led by DemRossiya, swept along by the pushing crowd,  snow and ice everywhere, so cold that my hands were literally too cramped to write on my reporter's notebook , and yet conscious something else cramped my style -- I'd be expected to write that this was a triumph for democracy, and yet marching by me were the toxic types like Laboring Moscow which was run by some kind of extreme communist and of course there were the Zhirinovsky extreme rightwing types as well. Not pretty, any of it.

So that's a bit of context for to explain why I think it matters HOW you get the news in WikiLeaks. I really think it's important that in the Pentagon Papers story, the act begins with Robert McNamara troubled about the implications of the war, commissioning a study, a group allowed to receive it, one of those peers leaking it to another peer, himself a government official. It is a community of context, and a context of community. The line then runs to the New York Times, also peers and in a shared context. The Times publishes this not merely because it's news, but because they have a shared sense of public mission -- newspapers in those days were more conscious perhaps than they are now of having to have a civic duty.

Not so WikiLeaks, which not only involves anonymous people we can't see so we can't tell if their context is really shared or not, but the leadership of their meglomaniac anarchist leader Assange whose worldviews aren't about conscience but about anarchy and destructiveness in radical birthing of some new transcendent state. Daniel Elsberg and the New York Times didn't want to overthrow the state; they wanted to make the existing one more moral and better. Julian Assange wants to overthrow the state and put into power a global stateless movement with himself and other conspirators in power -- indeed they are already in power.

I don't know why I would have to spend a lot of time explaining the difference, but apparently I did on Blogging heads. I think people in Russian and Eurasian affairs are very, very schooled in the analysis of how the revolution turned out bad for the Soviet Union's people because the methods used were immoral and unlawful -- that's something people in those countries get instantly.

Martin Luther King, Jr. did not use violence. Civil disobedience was not violence. It didn't take away the rights of others, it broke some rules that were themselves unjust. Unless we're going to posit that keeping diplomatic cables secret is an unjust rule -- and I think only extremists would posit that -- we can't concede that stealing government documents is

Oh, but in fact, the WikiLeaks supporters are saying that while in general that may be true, when it comes to the crimes of the United States, it's ok. And they're willing to say that if we wish to open up Russia or China and would find it perfectly fine to leak their documents about their nefarious doings, we have to be "equally" willing to

Well, no we don't. Some secrets of China and Russia about their appalling abuses of human rights and corruption should be leaked as a matter of conscience. That doesn't mean automatically that the U.S. is morally equivalent to them and deserves a leak, too. In fact, if we read these cables out there, the one thing in fact we don't find is some U.S. government crime against humanity. That could be debated, and collusion with BP in Azerbaijan might fit the test, but I would say by and large, these cables don't show the U.S. to be the immoral and craven power that Assange believes it to be. Obviously he and even the Guardian thought that leaking the cables on Iran would make the U.S. look the worst in the bargain -- it didn't. Has Assange himself been WikiLeaked by having to confront now the leaked contents of his distorted and hateful worldview and find that it was wrong? As the Russians say, don't blame the mirror if you have a crooked face...

What Bob Wright was willing to do was essentially bless the journalism that results from WikiLeaks as a good and needed thing, and not obsess on the process of how we got it. He says all journalists sitting at news desks are cynical in a sense by not caring HOW they got the information -- whether it was some disgruntled ex-employee or jilted lover or whatever, who cares? The important point isn't the motive of the leaker but "the story".

But I'm not willing to look at WikiLeaks as merely "the story" -- I think the methods and means really matter because this *is* the kind of world and Wired State we are going to get and are already getting and I'm not willing to concede that unconsciousness and thuggery are alright.

Reading Private Manning's email chat (if this is authentic -- and we don't know that it is, because Lamo, the source for it, was the one who reported Manning to the FBI for his own motives), we can see, amidst the narcissistic preoccupations, the admissions of self-medicating, the troubled psyche, some glimpses of conscience, for example, he didn't like having to arrest Iraqis who he thought were not doing something unlawful in printing a newsletter -- and if the story is told accurately in context, then I'd tend to agree.

But what is missing here for me is some overarching worldview that has *consciousness* at its root and purpose in its methods to achieve a goal. So the problem here isn't just the Bolshevik problem of "the ends justify the means," the problem is that there isn't even any end, and there is only means!!!

The machine did it here, not the people. That is, sure, people were negligent in taking care of this SIPRnet -- they didn't have good network and real world safeguards. But read Manning closely here. It seems as if his main emotional center of gravity isn't, "How can I go into this network I've found and find stuff that might help me make the case that the U.S. is doing the wrong thing in Iraq," instead, it's mainly deep scorn and contempt for people who had a network that was vulnerable -- it's a "deserves to be raped" kind of mentality. He is essentially saying, "I don't like it here, I don't like my own life, I don't like what I see, and I've found a hole in the system that I'm going to use to blow them sky high, fuck them."  I don't see that he had any consciousness or awareness of the relevance of the material for *making his case against war* -- let's say -- instead, it was about "let's fuck them over in this neat way I've found just because."

Perhaps the trial of Manning or his own book or something if he is released will help us understand if not only is there more to this 22-year-old's worldview, or whether there are others helping him (I think there would have to be.)

And as I said, if I found some people in a community of context and cause functioning with that moral purpose with altruistic motives, that might put WikiLeaks right for me. But I don't see it now. I see a machine accident caused not only by human negligence, but by the acceleration and amplifying powers of networks themselves, which are unconscious though coded, doing the "journalism" here.  Unconsciousness, automatic process, neglect, accident creating the "journalism", not conscience.

If the seminal moment of Private Manning's Iraq sojourn was seeing the arrest of people who were only writers -- let's posit -- or some other horror -- why not focus? Why not take just those cables/materials/files and tell the story *of what you know*. Why dump a lot of stuff *you don't know* just to stick it to the Man? In the end, some may find that my problem with Manning is a literary one -- he "didn't write what he knew". But it's also a "say, don't tell" problem -- guiding this was WikiLeaks "tell" which wasn't a "say" -- propagandistic and destructive world views. And the Wired chat illustrates that he may have been guided, and that the relationship between this particular dump and this private may be more extensive than we know -- and of course this is just what the U.S. government is exploring now.

I also raise questions in this tape about what the Guardian is doing, doling out news, possibly syncing it strategically -- and I have yet another story that works that way -- a cable about Richard Holbrooke only published on the day of his death and not weeks before when it might have made more of a difference or affected Clinton's Central Asian trip. But we're told with that story that it was pure accident -- a reader said "Look in your files for stuff about Polanski," and that cable happened to mention him December 13, and then he happened to die the next day, so that was what made it surface.

See how accidental this "journalism" is then? It's a key word search from a crowdsourced query, not consciousness or an individual reporter -- unless of course we're now supposed to believe along with Grateful Dead lyricist and cyber-utopian John Perry Barlow (and I'm not making this stuff up):

Collective consciousness is struggling to be born. It's no surprise that collective ignorance feels threatened.

Except...it's not. I continue to maintain that we need to ask questions about the strategic nature of the Guardian's publishing -- why the Mastercard story saved until the day Anonops attacks Mastercard?

If you think there's a lot of sausage-making in international diplomacy that isn't pretty, I think if we got a gander at the sausage-making of the WikiLeaks operation itself (and it has already forked, like all rigidly ideological "open" opensource projects), and got a peek at the dealings these mainstream media managers have made with these shadowy figures, it might not be so pretty. But we don't

 

 

 

Comments

[cube inada]

good post.so far good video.

Im into the video at about 20 min..

This Robert guy,---he still thinks he's in "control"...
I guess hes only had a mac laptop for a few years.;)

btw-- you need a "BELLA" HAT... and then you will get more coverage battleing Assanges hair. ... just my opinion.;)

30 years drunk, then dead? didnt know that... but now I have a plan...thanks.;)

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

I remember Bella in her hat when she used to come to the UN. I think she decided deliberately to make a trademark for herself, like Andrea Dworkin's overalls. If I didn't have certain conventions to consider, I might go around in a crew cut and a duck jacket myself, but honestly, I wasn't kidding when I told John Perry Barlow that like Dolores Claiborne, "I ain't doing no beauty pageants today." So I won't get a hat or an upswept "do" or anything of the kind. I know the dice is loaded in competing with the virtual reality gang and *their* hair. Of course, there is Philip's hair, triumphing over them all.

[cube inada]

stop being seduced by ole phil.... hes just the latest beber of the hair gang... and imo the least complex but most lucky and maybe the most "flexable" as to other peoples ideas to be absorbed and acted on the quickest.- so thats "good" i guess..for him.

im at 45 min in... this interviewer ...hes a "nice" guy.. but a jounalist whos kinda a tool;).. he uses the bloggervideo as a tool, but cant get thats its a medium....

he needs to learn more about the reality of the medium - today -- he'll get frighted, but then maybe he'll figure out the matrix.;)-- or just get a funkier haircut and a better timeslot.

BTW- i saw an old NY metapal on Colbert yesterday doing the cyberwar comedy skits... hes a nice guy too... but also makes the "civil lunch" arguments... which i dont buy either...

Ghandi with guns (sponsored by nike)... what else can you get after 20 years of first person shooters as mass entertianment media....

actions reported by

Cronkite with an AK ... give me the story - or esle..bub.

the voices in my head want to drink... ;)lol

video just ended... thanks to you both for becoming fodder for the machine...and maybe reaching the last few humans...

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

The original NYT discussion

Robert Wright's article and my comment:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/julian-assange-neocon-tool/

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/julian-assange-neocon-tool/?permid=356#comment356