When – and if – the dust settles from this hallucinogenic presidential election, serious news outlets need to rethink the journalistic value of Wikileaks. Once viewed as a noble whistleblower, a digital version of Watergate’s Deep Throat, this unseemly outfit has become an ugly goiter on the body politic.
Founded by Julian Assange in 2006, the organization was devoted to “combating secrecy”, largely by procuring leaked, hacked or otherwise purloined information that shed light on the shadows of unsavory government operations. In 2010, for example, Wikileaks released thousands of classified documents that raised serious questions about the manner in which the United States conducted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was praised by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) as a “new breed of media that offers important opportunities” for news organizations. That was then. Now is a whole different deal.
Right wing websites have been ablaze this week (here, here and here) with Assange’s promises that his next batch of Hillary Clinton emails will lead to her arrest, just in time for the election. He made that boast from his perch in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he’s got a bed-and-asylum deal protecting him from a Swedish rape charge. Heralding Hillary’s arrest, of course, was the promised capstone of Wikileaks’ summer and fall project: the serialized release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign staff. There seems to be a rare consensus among U.S. intelligence operatives that Russia was responsible for the email hacking. Predictably, Assange would not reveal his source. You cannot, after all, combat secrecy without keeping some secrets. But what he did share with us, through an interview last July with a British television host, was that he absolutely opposes Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and views her as a “personal foe.” He told the interviewer that he would rather see Donald Trump elected.
So let’s review: an avowed political partisan with an ax to grind is dodging rape charges while systematically releasing his political opponent’s private emails that were likely hacked by Russian spies. Compared to the pedestrian position paper stuff I covered as a political reporter in the 1970s, this all seems rather otherworldly. Of course it is a much different world than the Carter v. Ford days of 1976. With the Wide World Web, you don’t have to go to Alice’s Restaurant to get what you want. A flick of the keyboard connects you to endless verbiage on how the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the Moon Landing were both staged for political purposes.
The difference here, however, is that serious, responsible media institutions have, with seemingly little forethought, bestowed the banner of credibility on Wikileaks. On a daily basis, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Politico have been doling out the hacked emails despite an absence of authenticity and, with a few notable exceptions, any meaningful news value. The thinking seems to be that the emails are news simply because they are out there. I don’t seem to remember that standard from journalism school, but I was young then and skipped class a lot.
There is a compelling need for news organizations to step back and seriously think out how they should responsibly treat Wikileaks in the future. It seems abundantly clear that it has changed significantly since the days when the IFJ characterized it as a serious new media outlet. Even without the Russian connection and Julian Assange’s political vendetta, there remains the question of whether responsible news organizations should routinely make public the content of private communication that is otherwise void of substantive value. The vast majority of the published emails rose only to the level of what we baby boomers remember from the ancient days of party line telephones, where you could occasionally hear a neighbor say something that you weren’t supposed to hear.
For political junkies, it’s fun and amusing to read how Clinton campaign director John Podesta totally trashed some party functionary. But the news value is limited. It doesn’t begin to compare to Edward Snowden’s releases concerning the National Security Agency’s secret access to the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens. Having spent a good chunk of my life in and around newsrooms, large and small, I can tell you that a collection of hacked emails from those places would make fascinating reading. Reporters and their editors are pretty creative when it comes to trashing each other and their rivals.
As the renowned linguist, Deborah Tannen, recently observed in a Washington Post op-ed, we all communicate with at least two voices, public and private. For the sake of civility and relationship preservation, we vent and carry on something fierce about friends, family and coworkers when talking or emailing with a trusted few, and then clean up our acts for broader exposure. If the only value in publishing hacked emails is to destroy that construct, then I think it best to let those who really want to wallow in that kind of muck go directly to the Wikileaks site. Fascination is an insufficient standard for news value. Millions of people are fascinated by pornography, but they don’t get there through the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The only thing about political journalism that hasn’t changed over the years is the relationship between partisan sources and reporters – the users and the used. It is, at once, symbiotic and codependent. It works best when both parties fully comprehend their roles and motives, when journalists weigh and evaluate not just the information given to them but also the sources who provided it. The problem with Wikileaks is that it was once considered a serious news outlet in its own right. That is obviously no longer the case. It is as partisan as those it hacks, and should be treated accordingly.