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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.
This lack of professionalism can cost people their job. Here's an article about a 9 year old 'wrongfully' suspended for saying a teacher was 'cute'.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/05/student-9-years-old-suspended-for-sexual-harassment_n_1129683.html
Following the social and Internet outcry over such an obscene misjudgement by the Principal, here's the follow up piece where he was forced to retire over the situation.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/07/9277654-principal-forced-out-over-9-year-olds-sexual-harassment-suspension
And here's the real story, where the kid in question has a history of bad behaviour, including racism and the actual suspension was the consequence of a series of incidents, and the kid never used the word cute anyway as originally reported
http://www.wsoctv.com/download/2011/1205/29926822.pdf
It's not about embracing technology, it's about all the pieces to the puzzle being reported, rather than skipping half the story and being less than truthful about the other half.
Rushing out 'facts' out of context is not good journalism, regardless of medium.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Generally if an actual journalist is forced to only give one side of the story due to stone walling they append to their article something along the lines of 'blah was approached for comments and has refused'.
You don't tend to see that on all the one sided, drama filled journoblogs, or in the wikileaks ;)
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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.