WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
Julian Assange
Showing how you got your information is what academics do by citing sources with references and footnotes and bloggers do the same by linking. With digital technology, it is now possible for a journalist to offer drill down routes to some of the sources of his story. This is sound as far as it goes. First hand information is generally better than second hand. We litry critters are taught to read the original text closely rather than someone else‘s interpretation, and historians who rely on secondary sources instead of coalface research get a pasting. For myself, I would have called this “drill down journalism“, or “data journalism” rather than the pompous “scientific journalism“.
However most us absorb the raw data in a handful of subjects only, those that really interest us (in many people that will be football) or that are related to our work, and accept authorities for the rest. There simply isn’t time to go through all the raw data even if we understood it. So we choose authorities , whether it’s The Guardian, the BBC or The Sun. If I see eastern Europe via Timothy Garton Ash, and banking via John Lanchester that’s because I think they know a lot more about them than I could ever know and I regard them as trustworthy. Most people who have read the Wikileaks stories have read them via outlets they trust.
Journalism is more than data. Good journalists have to assess the reliability of their sources, which requires judgement and knowledge, attributes that can’t be demonstrated by a heap of documents. They have instincts of selection and emphasis arising from cultural background which they would not be able to tabulate.
And when it comes to the truth of his own stories, as so often with Assange, it is a case of Physician, heal thyself. Before a Panorama programme which he guessed would be hostile towards him, he said in an interview with Francesco Piccinin for the French online magazine Agora Vox:-
What relationships did you with other Media UK ? Why do they accuse you of being anti-Semitic?
Our relationships are not looking good. Particularly with the BBC. Today I was verbally attacked a journalist at the exit of the station. It was John Sweeney's Panorama program. The BBC is one of our biggest rivals. . .. They will make a show that will air on Monday (coincidentally during the first day of trial) and try and influence judges. We finally discovered that the wife of producer for this show was part of the Zionist movement in London.
(This interview was in French and translated by the internet and me. Neither of us is good at French.)
Could he please give us the name and website of this London Zionist movement that the producer’s influential wife belongs to? Who is this “we” that thinks the BBC tries to influence judges' decisions?
The producer of the Panorama programme was Jim Booth, who is quoted as saying: ". . .he can only be talking about me. I have got no idea why he said that. My wife is not Jewish, has nothing to do with Zionism or the Jewish community. It's absolutely ridiculous and insulting for me as a producer. I do not set out with an agenda and he gave the sense there was a Jewish agenda. Assange is a pioneer and Wikileaks is a tremendous thing but I wish he had got his facts right.”
“Getting your facts right” is the old fashioned expression for “scientific journalism”.
However Assange is inclined to see the Zionist hidden hand. From the same interview:-
Are you more afraid of Israel or the U.S.?
It is the union of two countries that scares me the most. For an even better reason because they share a number of interests in the Iraqi conflict. Bush has supported Israel since it was surrounded by friends at the head of the oil companies. Israel, meanwhile, has strong ties with the east coast of the United States. Not only because of the presence of many Jews on American soil, but also because many Israeli passports were provided to the Jews of the east coast to strengthen their ties with their homeland. Russia has done the same with South Ossetia, distributing passports to the local population to promote the fight against Georgian nationalism.
He hasn’t used the words “Zionist entity” yet, but that will come. This kind of Israel controlling every darned thing is a few steps away from explaining media hostility towards you by some people in the media being Jewish, or their brothers-in-law being Jewish, as he said to Ian Hislop of Private Eye. It’s an infection going round at the moment, so, for instance, a blog conversation about why Seven Jewish Children is a bit dodgy will soon have hints of networks, lobbies, machines and other forces - never explicitly named or with their members listed, but there, somehow.
Assange has said of this conversation with Hislop that “Hislop has distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase“ but Hislop says in Private Eye (issue 1284) that he took notes and typed it up immediately. “The content of the conversation was too bizarre to invent, too surprising to misremember and too weird to need distortion.”
So in this instance we have conflicting raw data. I’d go with Hislop myself.
Also in the Vox Agora interview Assange says:-
This media has accused me of collaborating with the alleged anti-Semitic Israel Shamir who supports us. He is a journalist and writer born in Siberia and settled in Israel. Denying Judaism and becoming pro-Palestinian, he was later converted to Russian Orthodoxy. That is why he is hated in the same proportions as Salman Rushdie. He now lives in Sweden, and as he helped us for a while, the media accuse us our turn of being anti-Semitic, of having provided documents to the Russians and having relations with Lukashenka.
It’s easy enough to drill down to where Assange gets the totally off key idea that you can compare the hatred against the “alleged” anti-Semitic Israel Shamir with the hatred against Salman Rushdie- it’s what Shamir says about himself. (Google "israel shamir" "salman rushdie" if you need to check).
The Panorama programme got hold of an email that Assange had written to Shamir:-
Dear Israel/Adam
Someone wrote saying they refused to associate with an organisation that would work with an anti-Semite like Israel Shamir. . .
From a brief sampling of your writing I did not find the allegation borne out. I found the samples to be strong and compassionate.
I did a brief sampling of Shamir’s work myself and found stuff like this:-
David Irving was sentenced for denial of Jewish superiority. His doom seals the reign of (albeit limited) freedom that began with the fall of Bastille. European history went full circle: from rejecting the rule of Church and embracing free thought, to the new Jewish mind-control on a world scale. Not only is Western Christian civilisation dead, but even its successor, secular European civilisation, has met its demise only a few days after its proud and last celebration by the Danish scribes. It was short-lived: about two hundred years from beginning to the end, the Europeans may once have had the illusion that they can live without an ideological supremacy. Now this illusion is over; and the Jews came in the stead of the old and tired See of St Peter to rule over the minds and souls of Europeans.
I’m not going to link to the scabby-tailed rat so you can google that for yourself to read the whole thing "in context".
Could Julian Assange quote the “strong and compassionate” writings he came across in Shamir? Also, if you are assessing someone’s views “a brief sampling” isn’t really enough. You have to read a fair amount and it isn’t a bad idea to google them and find what other people say about them as well. Where’s the “scientific journalism” when you need it?
Julian then suggested Shamir write for Wikileaks under another name.
I would say Assange had some fellow feeling with Shamir as a bit of a freebooter, what with his way of changing identities (the indulgent Dear Israel/Adam suggests that) and as one who is persecuted, as he sees it. So he opened his arsenal of data and handed him one of the weapons, which Shamir has been using to support the regime in Belarus against its opposition.
Assange has said that Shamir’s association with Wikileaks was minimal and when asked he didn’t explain that email. He has said that Shamir was merely given access to some of the diplomatic cable data - whereas of course someone like him should not have been given access to any of it. If Assange stopped avoiding the question and showed himself to be aware of the implications that you can draw from his finding Shamir’s views congenial I would give him a pass. He could admit his dealings with Shamir were just a big error of judgement. After all, Assange has been under great pressure and has a huge mountain of data to shift, arrange and distribute. He may have handled most of it impeccably for all I know.
The feeling you get from Assange is of someone who has moved from a culture of hacking and fantasy into the world of the mainstream media. So he says and does things that make him seem like an arrogant twit with no notion of how he comes across. But he has got plenty of friends who know the British media so what was he doing calling up the editor of Private Eye of all magazines with his Jewish conspiracy stuff? He has left the fortified island of the laptop and moved into the much larger plain of the piss-take, where he will find himself more and more exposed to attack.
Assange seems to have no idea that when setting up Wikileaks, which was designed to challenge the powerful, he has become powerful himself, and so will be challenged in his turn. It's a very old story. The beautiful young guerrilla rides in a tank through the capital city of the state whose old corrupt ruler has just fled. Then the guerrilla becomes El Presidente and starts chucking dissenters into jail and regards any criticism of himself as betrayal and an international conspiracy formed against him. Robin Hood the outlaw made his name by undermining the Sheriff of Nottingham, but when Robin Hood got his own earldom in a neighbouring shire, you would find quite a few poachers were manacled in his dungeons. He still thinks he's an outlaw, though.
Good post, Rosie.
Posted by: Norman Lamont (no relation!) | 29 March 2011 at 08:30 AM
this never gave me the amount they get paid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: leticia | 26 April 2011 at 02:14 PM