Wikileaks Founder Assange debates NY Times on investigative journalism, media
Over at PBS’s Mediashift, Mark Glaser has been diligently covering the exclusive Logan Symposium, held annually at University of California at Berkley.
Here, Glaser has published an excellent summary of events, which included a partially-paraphrased introduction by Lowell Bergman, UC Berkeley:
We’ll have a series of talks about WikiLeaks, along with a videotape we produced with Julian Assange. He was here last year, and can’t be here this year, obviously. We did send an invitation to Bradley Manning but he can’t make it.
Julian is not really a source. He’s a new kind of person, with a new kind of vocation. We all need to do a lot of thinking about it. He’s not a source, and he’s not a legacy journalist. He’s an advocate and that’s not rare among journalists these days.
Glaser also has excerpts from a debate between representatives from the news outlets that worked with and published the Wikileaks (New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel,) and Julian Assagne. Assange joined the discussion from the U.K. via satellite, because he’s internationally-cool like that.
Video by Glaser:
Q: What was in the fourth packet? [play]
Q: How well did the media cover the links? [play]
Julian Assange on how the US media doesn’t care about the world. [play]
What will happen for future sources of leaks? [play]
The thing to understand about this is that we mustn’t busy ourselves with debating the merits of leaked information and the integrity of journalism, but rather act upon the content of the leaks. There are very smart people already figuring out how to secure the proper channels for public interest, and bold figures who stand in dissent and draw the attention of mass media (though it could be argued that by doing so, Assange has more hurt than helped Wikileaks.) But where are the people and journalists demanding the the US Gov’t allow the NY Times to release the information? If our government cannot sort through the files in a timely manner, and/or refuses to release any of the information afterward, then the mainstream media must stand up on behalf of the public, and the public must support the media at all costs.
Though how you go about doing so is well beyond my understanding.
