This will be one in a series of posts on the issues associated with Wikileaks -- which I've posted on before -- and its ongoing efforts to make previously secret information available online. This included the recent release of documents related to the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
In an article in the New Yorker, Wikileak's founder (Julian Assange) states the following: “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative.
This fits into 2301s discussion of the media. The web has transformed journalism and raised questions about who in fact qualifies as a journalist. The job involves collecting and processing information. It seems that Wikileaks is trying to make the former easier and opening up the latter to all comers.
- Wikipedia: Wikileaks.
- NY Topics: Wikileaks.
