10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
One of the oddest strands of the WikiLeaks story in the US over the past year — and this week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the “collateral murder” video that first launched the site to fame — has been the reaction of other journalists. Traditional media outlets would seem to share much in common with the whistle-blowing site, most importantly the core public-service mission of holding power accountable.
US media outlets, though — and even those that have worked alongside WikiLeaks — have been among the outfit’s harshest critics.
“They’ve been joining — even leading — the chorus calling for the prosecution of WikiLeaks,” liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald said Friday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. He held particular scorn for New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who has been on a public speaking circuit lately trying to draw a distinction between the responsible Gray Lady and its troubled “source.” (Just imagine, suggested Christopher Warren, of the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, if every journalist had to pass the personality test to which Julian Assange has been held.)
Theories abound as to where all the hostility comes from, and it does seem to be unique to the American media. In it’s simplest form, it may be rooted in pure competitive jealousy. But Greenwald and several other panelists Friday pointed to a more worrisome strand in the US media psyche — a fear of illegitimate interlopers among the professional class of “gatekeepers.”
This could have dangerous consequences, Warren warns. When US media outlets like the New York Times insists on calling WIkiLeaks a “source” and not a media partner, they make it easier for the government to deny WikiLeaks — or any organisation like it in the future — the institutional protections afforded the press.
Australian journalists get this, Warren said.
“They understand that if we allow WikiLeaks to be singled out,” he said, “it’s a threat to every person who seeks to practice independent journalism.”
One of the other great ironies of this story is that, as Harvard professor Yochai Benkler has pointed out, government officials and traditional-media critics have come down all the harder on Wikileaks as it has grown more responsible, and come more to resemble a traditional media organisation than a mere document-dumping one. From the “collateral murder” video to the Iraq war logs, to the Afghan diaries to the diplomatic cable cache, WikiLeaks has evolved in how it releases documents, whom it gives them to and what gets redacted.
Today, it functions an awful lot like a media outlet in that sense — but a media outlet that differs from the Times, in Greenwald’s eyes, in that it feels no deference to the US government.
8 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
News International’s apology over phone hacking, welcome and overdue as it is, cannot “draw a line” under phone hacking.
This gesture, and the settlement of some of the private claims for breach of privacy by hacking victims, must not bring to a halt the process of exposing the facts, because so far we have only seen a small fraction of those facts. The litigants and their lawyers have transformed our understanding of what happened by their relentless demands for documents from the police and the company, but we need that process to continue.
As the former Tory Cabinet minister, Lord Fowler, has said, only a public inquiry will get to the bottom of this. That’s what it will take to address the full breadth of issues at stake, from the role of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to the relationships between News International and government, and from the sinister silence of the rest of the tabloid press to the conduct of senior company executives right up to Rupert Murdoch himself. Who was doing this? Who knew? When? Was there a cover-up? What was the role of the phone companies? Who was implicated? We need an exhaustive investigation.
What we are dealing with here, after all, appears to have been a sustained assault on the privacy of dozens and possibly hundreds of people, from royalty to Cabinet ministers, and from film actors and sportsmen to journalists and ordinary private citizens. We still have no idea of its full extent — whether, for example, other newspapers were engaged in the same practices. All this has important national security implications and raises big questions about how Britain is governed. And as with Watergate, the crime may have been bad, but the sequel was worse.
So far as News International executives are concerned, they must not be allowed to escape appropriate public scrutiny. In admitting, by implication at least, that Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were not the only News of the World employees engaged in illegally accessing people’s voicemails, they formally put to rest the “single rogue reporter” defence they sustained from 2007 until this January. But they must now be forced to explain themselves properly, not just in a brief, slick corporate statement, but one by one in an inquiry witness box, under cross-examination from leading barristers.
How, for example, do they now justify the company’s oft-repeated claim that, back in 2006-7, it thoroughly investigated the affair, that it deployed a top firm of white-collar fraud experts on the task, that it interrogated its own reporters and sifted through thousands of emails, and that the failure of these Herculean efforts proved its innocence?
Colin Myler, the paper’s editor, told the Press Complaints Commission in 2007 and the House of Commons Select Committee on the media in 2009 that he personally had led the investigation. Les Hinton, now the CEO of the Wall Street Journal, twice assured MPs that this investigation had been thorough. Tom Crone, head of legal affairs at News Group Newspapers, and Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, helped to make the same case.
It doesn’t end there. James Murdoch, now deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, approved a secret £700,000 payout to Gordon Taylor which prevented the public from learning important information about hacking, and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who refused to testify before MPs, should also account for her role. Are all these people really fit to hold senior positions in a leading public company? We should find out.
And in the background now is Andy Coulson, former editor of the paper and former media adviser to David Cameron. He told MPs he knew nothing of phone hacking, and repeated the assertion under oath in a court of law. It is now acknowledged that his ignorance was not limited to what his royal editor was up to. So just how extensive was it?
We need an inquiry. Indeed if we don’t have one, if we let it lie on the strength of a few million in compensation, we are accepting that there is no kind of trouble that Rupert Murdoch and his company can’t buy their way out of.
READ ALL OF BRIAN CATHCART’S BRILLIANT ANALYSIS OF THE PHONEHACKING SCANDAL HERE
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
8 Apr 2011 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
The French Association of Internet Community Services, a group of more than 20 internet companies including Facebook and eBay, have gone to court over new a new regulation which obliges them to store extensive data on their users. The data includes full names, passwords and telephone numbers. Under the new law, Internet companies are obliged to share this information with French authorities as and when they are required do so. The Association has complained that the French government failed to consult with the European Commission prior to passing the law.
8 Apr 2011 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News and features
The Libyan government has decided to deport 26 foreign journalists from the country. The journalists, who had all been invited by the government, were initially told that they would have to leave by Thursday; however their departure has now been postponed until 9 April. Reports suggest that the names of the reporters were posted in the lobby of the hotel they were staying in. This deportation follows the expulsion of various other journalists from the country.
