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Using WikiLeaks As a Tool In Investigative Journalism
Hugh Pickens writes writes "It took a team of ten reporters working two months to sift through 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables at the NY Times, but when a story idea recently came up that I wanted to research in more detail, I found Wikileaks to be a very useful and accessible tool for further investigation. First, some background: For the past ten years I have written stories about Peace Corps safety and medical issues, the Peace Corps' budget appropriations, and the work done by volunteers in their countries of service on a web site I publish called 'Peace Corps Online.' When the Peace Corps announced last month they were taking the unusual step of suspending their program in Kazakhstan and withdrawing all 117 volunteers, I decided to dig deeper and find out what was behind the decision to leave the country. First I went to blogs of volunteers serving in Kazakhstan and found that four rapes or sexual assaults of volunteers had occurred in the past year and that it had became increasingly difficult for volunteers to conduct their work. But the biggest revelation was when I found fourteen U.S. diplomatic cables on Wikileaks that cited elements in the Kazakhstani 'pro-Russian old-guard at the Committee for National Security (the KNB, successor to the KGB) aimed at discrediting the Peace Corps and damaging bilateral relations' with the U.S. Further investigation on Wikileaks revealed how one Peace Corps volunteer had been sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2009 after 'what appeared to be a classic Soviet-style set-up.' The volunteer was only freed through the diplomatic efforts of U.S. Ambassador Richard Hoagland and the personal intervention of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev."
How did you verify this information that you found on a third party site? How did you confirm that the U.S. diplomats were not trying to re-awaken old fears of the KGB by spreading misinformation in their communications? Did you find any evidence in these communications of the volunteers doing anything wrong? Did you contact the people the volunteers had worked with in Kazakhstan? Did you request a comment from the KNB?
Further investigation on Wikileaks revealed ...
No, that is wrong. That is not journalism. Nothing was revealed. You have a tip. Face it, you can't wake up, make a cup of coffee in your home and decide that today you're going to 'do' investigative journalism. Journalists are people who go out and acquire information, allegations, evidence, testimony, etc first hand. You could have started with Wikileaks as a tip, as a lead and put together your own external information from multiple sources. At best you have one side of an issue here and at worst you've been indirectly mislead. This shouldn't be called journalism. This should be called "googling."
I'm not saying you are wrong with this information, what I'm saying is that the NY Times wouldn't run this story unless they did due diligence to be completely sure they are 100% right because they are held to journalistic standards. As a blogger or armchair Wikileaks reader, you have nothing to lose by publishing this under your pseudo-name online. "Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at investigative journalism today." But let's face it, you get this wrong and you lose nothing. A journalist gets this wrong and they should lose their job and be blacklisted. And that's how news sources work.
My work here is dung.
And it could be even worse actually: They could be directly mislead. What if the information on Wikileaks is false? We have no real way of knowing how much of it is actually leaked US diplomatic cables. Could be all of it, however it also could be that someone put false information in there for their own reasons. It isn't as though the US went through and said "Yep, all these are legitimate, everything in here was originally a secret US communication."
I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, I'm saying particularly with a source like Wikileaks you have to understand that it COULD happen and thus for proper journalism you must assume that is the case, until you have proof it isn't. You have to operate from the position of skepticism always. That doesn't mean you dismiss shit, just that you refuse to believe it until you can prove it.
Otherwise, you risk not just doing something accidentally misleading, but outright being used. Someone can use you to spread misinformation simply by planting it in a place that you trust since you don't bother to verify.
I'm not saying you are wrong with this information, what I'm saying is that the NY Times wouldn't run this story unless they did due diligence to be completely sure they are 100% right because they are held to journalistic standards. As a blogger or armchair Wikileaks reader, you have nothing to lose by publishing this under your pseudo-name online. "Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at investigative journalism today." But let's face it, you get this wrong and you lose nothing. A journalist gets this wrong and they should lose their job and be blacklisted. And that's how news sources work.
Face it, Blogging, Twitter, even SMS have changed the foundation of journalism as we know it. It's now the people on the street who are witness to events and can record them with their cellphones and instantly upload them to the net - anonymously or not. The information moves so quickly around the world that many so called traditional journalists are left in the dust. So, you can stick with your old antiquated notions of what constitutes journalism (and many who do are part of an industry that is quickly going bankrupt), or you can get with the program and embrace the technology of the 21st century. For all the praise of NYtimes, they are run at a loss and are at the behest of the billionaire Carlos Slim. A civilian with a cellphone is now more objective than a journalist worried about their next paycheck.
Face it, Blogging, Twitter, even SMS have changed the foundation of journalism as we know it.
When was that ever up for debate? Of course it has! Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse! When 'news' spreads like wildfire across Twitter and it turns out to be correct, it was a great thing. You might be downplaying the other results though.
It's now the people on the street who are witness to events
When was it anybody else? These are the first hand accounts you must go out and find your self, not through Wikileaks through stolen U.S. documents.
and can record them with their cellphones and instantly upload them to the net - anonymously or not.
Record what? Where is Pickens presenting any recorded information here? Hell, I can't even find a sound bite from a Peace Corp volunteer that was raped. You give me video, that's hard to spoof and I might buy that if it's anonymous. In the future, video manipulation will be better and we'll lose the ability to tell if compressed cell phone footage is legit.
The information moves so quickly around the world that many so called traditional journalists are left in the dust. So, you can stick with your old antiquated notions of what constitutes journalism (and many who do are part of an industry that is quickly going bankrupt), or you can get with the program and embrace the technology of the 21st century.
Yeah, so here's the core of your disagreement with me. You think that I'm fighting the speed at which information and news flows. That's not true, I'm one of the highest submitters here on Slashdot. I love it, I want it to move as fast as possible. But all that motion and speed isn't worth a goddamn thing when you're spreading unverified information or lies. And that's what I'm calling out here.
For all the praise of NYtimes, they are run at a loss and are at the behest of the billionaire Carlos Slim. A civilian with a cellphone is now more objective than a journalist worried about their next paycheck.
Seriously? Are you serious? Did you know that "Hugh Pickens" used to be a member of the Peace Corps? Did he disclose that potentially biased information in his article on his site that he linked to and calls "news"? Would that perhaps slant his views? I don't care if he has a cellphone. Other news sources are reporting allegations of espionage from the Peace Corp. Oh, sure, that could just as well be the KNB at work and nowhere is Pickens saying that any of the hundreds of members of Peace Corp could have done anything wrong. But nobody's bothering to try to find this out. I like how you play the 'objectivity' card when it comes to money for journalists but you have got to be out of your goddamn mind if you think that this "news" is more objective than what the NY Times would publish on this piece. They would send reporters to Kazakhstan if they were going to run this piece and they would verify all their sources and you're saying that the motivation of money is why they are biased? Again I ask you, are you serious?
My work here is dung.
Perhaps the oft-expressed "Occam's Razor" is as relevant here as it was in those stories whose uncorroborated evidence pointed to US misdeed (Stuxnet stories for example)? Between Russian interference as suggested by the evidence in this story, and an even more complex US misinformation campaign to damage Russia, which is the more likely? Or is Occam's Razor only relevant to stories whose evidence show the US in a bad light, and coincidentally breaks down for those whose evidence points to an adversary of the US?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Getting information out of the hard corners of the world is difficult. Reporters would rather be trashing a civilized society than go some place where they could get killed! That's just the sorry fact of journalism. Look at the number of women reporters who were sexually assaulted in Egypt during the "Arab Spring". Now go somewhere the government really hates you (because you are a westerner, or worse yet - an American)!
Truth be told, he should have come with better sourcing; but the story does match up with some of the problems reported recently about sexual assaults from within the Peace Corps.
Should be doesn't necessarily define what journalism is.
As often happens on Slashdot, people on Slashdot are defining what it is based on what they think it should be.
The reality is, in its current state, 'journalism' covers a lot of things which doesn't necessarily live up to the level of rigor and independent verification which is being implied here. So, I completely fail to see how using Wikileaks to corroborate the stuff for your investigative journalism fails to be journalism.
Journalism sometimes takes the form of publishing someone's press release in the guise of an article or just taking a story off the wire and re-publishing it ... which, sadly, is similar to how the people who pass laws just put forth copy provided by the people paying for those laws.
Arbitrarily saying "one of these is real journalism and the other isn't" doesn't really serve any purpose as long as you don't hold the 'real' ones to any meaningful standard either. Unless you're holding the 'traditional' ones to account, what's the point in saying the others aren't really journalists either?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I worked for a pretty huge newspaper from 1999 to mid 2000's
Half of the guys called their contacts on the police PD, the other on the prefecture hall. And a few got cars and went to report on the occasional violent crime investigation.
But most of them just browsed the internet and watched TV news... and typed that rightly into the paper/online version.
Halfway of my time there, there was a new ombudsman (2yr as ombudsman criticizing the newspaper and listening to the public, 2yr back working regularly for the newspaper with no fear of being fired, then fired)
His first sunday op-ed column was a critic about exactly that. That the newsroom was always crowded. no one ever left it. there was no real journalism going on.
bonus history: one of the competing websites from another newspaper, outright copied our histories (which were type from TV most of the time anyway) and just time-stamped them a few minutes or hours earlier... sometimes creating timestamps of even before the reported event.
I'm not saying you are wrong with this information, what I'm saying is that the NY Times wouldn't run this story unless they did due diligence to be completely sure they are 100% right because they are held to journalistic standards. As a blogger or armchair Wikileaks reader, you have nothing to lose by publishing this under your pseudo-name online. "Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at investigative journalism today." But let's face it, you get this wrong and you lose nothing. A journalist gets this wrong and they should lose their job and be blacklisted. And that's how news sources work.
Just like the New York Times did their homework before running those stories saying that Iraq had WMDs... we all remember how well that one worked out, don't we? That's arguably the single biggest journalistic cock-up in the past twenty years. Judith Miller got too close to her White House sources and repeated their "evidence" without doing her homework and checking the facts. When we most needed the Times to be on top of things- to provide a objective check on the White House's arguments for invading Iraq- they ended up parroting the White House's propaganda and helped persuade the nation to send our army into the biggest military disaster since Vietnam.
As far as what this guy has done reporting on the situation in Kazakhstan, he's gone through Wikileaks and reported what diplomats are saying in these cables... how, precisely, does this differ from what the Times and other news information outlets were doing with the Wikileaks cables? Were they calling up and diplomats and saying, "excuse me, I'd like to fact check something... did you or did you not say that Russian prime minister Medvedev was 'Robin to Putin's Batman?'" As far as I know, they just read through the cables and reported what was written there.
So basically you're just pissed because he used the word "journalism" for what he did, in the same way that insecure engineers always have to chime in pointing out loudly for everyone to see that THIS person is NOT properly called an engineer because he doesn't satisfy requirements X, Y, or Z.
Obviously you consider yourself one hell of a journalist, or at least a "proper" one, or have close ties to this field, or you wouldn't have felt so moved to immediately explain in the first post how badly this news article sucks. Wait...what kind of journalist is so absorbed into reading slashdot that he would have time to write such a length, detailed slashdot first post?
I'm glad this article was posted. I found the summary interesting. That's what I read slashdot for--interesting summaries, sometimes articles, and always for the interesting comments. It's quite revealing how much some people reveal about themselves unintentionally.