Later On

Via Glenn Greenwald, in an update to his column:

NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has a characteristically insightful and thought-provoking analysis of WikiLeaks, expressed through a 14-minute video.  Regarding why many valuable sources prefer to give their documents and other leaks to WikiLeaks rather than traditional press outlets, he says:

In the American case, one of the reasons is that the legitimacy of the press itself is in doubt in the minds of the leakers.  And there’s good reason for that.  Because while we have what purports to be a "watchdog press," we also have — laid out in front of us — the clear record of the watchdog press’  failure to do what it says it can do, which is provide a check on power when it tries to conceal its deeds and its purpose. 

So I think it’s a mistake to try to reckon with WikiLeaks and what it’s about without including in the frame the spectacular failures of the watchdog press over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years – but especially recently.  And so without this legitimacy crisis in mainstream American journalism, the leakers might not be so inclined to trust an upstart like Julian Assange and a shadowy organization like WikiLeaks . . . 

These kinds of huge, cataclysmic events [the Iraq War] within the legitimacy regime lie in the background of the WikiLeaks case, because if it wasn’t for those things, WikiLeaks wouldn’t have the supporters it has, the leakers wouldn’t collaborate the way they do, and the moral force behind exposing what this Government is doing just wouldn’t be there. . . . The watchdog press died, and what we have is WikiLeaks instead.

Most American journalists — represented by Jonathan Capehart in the video above and the Post‘s self-praising contrast between the Free, Robust American Press and the anemic, controlled "Arab media" — are so far away from even beginning to process those facts, indeed are constitutionally incapable of understanding or facing them, that they are just in a different universe than reality.  And that — combined with the fact that they are rooted in and dependent upon the very political system they are supposed to check and which these disclosures threaten — are the reasons why most of them react to WikiLeaks with an equal dose of confoundedness and contempt.

Greenwald also comments on the strange criticisms of the latest dump: that it is both a Grave Danger to US National Security and that it shows Nothing New. How can it be both? In fact, there’s a fair amount that’s new. Greenwald lists some:

If there’s Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures: 

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA’s kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA’s torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post‘s own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.’s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal — a coup – but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

That’s just a sampling.

This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress — literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet.  And "journalists" like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there’s "nothing new" being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this.  And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media?  But remember — as Capehart’s newspaper taught us today — "revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers" in Free America — showing what a Vibrant, Adversarial Press we are blessed with — but "in many Arab countries, the mainstream media have largely avoided reporting on the sensitive contents of the cables."