Now that the initial shock from the release of American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks has passed, journalists are starting to evaluate the impact of the revelations contained in the dispatches.
The Center for Strategic and International (CSIS) in Washington, DC, convened a panel discussion in December, titled Wikileaks: Impact on Public Policy and Journalism, during which panelists tried to place the controversy stirred by WikiLeaks within the American journalistic tradition.
One of the panelists, Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post, said that, while interesting, the WikiLeaks cables did not produce the same kind of revelations generated by the leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 amid the Vietnam War. “With very few exceptions, they [WikiLeaks cables] tend to cover issues that we or other media organizations have already written about and provide additional details that are always good to have in stories,” DeYoung said. For example, “if you look at the corruption in Afghanistan, certainly there were new details. …. So you had a broader and deeper sense of what it was that the Americans objected to.”
John Hamre, CSIS President and a former deputy secretary of defense, added that “the reason the Pentagon Papers had such impact is because it was a private story that was at variance with” what US officials were saying in public. In the case of WikiLeaks, he added, there was not “any activity being reported that was not broadly sustained by our public discourse.” The fact that the public and private diplomacy was “hugely consistent tells me that the government does deserve a vote of confidence. ... It testifies to the integrity of our diplomacy in my view.”
Scott Shane of the New York Times agreed that the WikiLeaks cables contained no significant scoops. But he said the release of the cables still served a purpose. “In a democracy it’s newsworthy that what the diplomats are saying is not at odds with what we generally understand our foreign policy to be,” he said.
Both Shane and DeYoung related that WikiLeaks’ chief, Julian Assange, decided to deny the newspapers cables when he became upset by their depiction of him in earlier stories. The New York Times obtained the State Department cables from the British newspaper The Guardian as part of a cooperative arrangement.
The WikiLeaks cables contained some candid assessments of foreign leaders. For example, one cable compared Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to Sonny and Michael Corleone, the fictional mob bosses depicted in the Godfather trilogy. Such cables caused some diplomatic embarrassment, but, in the case of the Aliyev cable, Baku later stated that the unflattering depiction of the president would not impact bilateral relations.
WikilLeaks’ action was not a journalistic endeavor to play a watchdog function, asserted Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent of CBS News and the panel’s moderator. DeYoung countered that she would “classify it as journalism, just a sort of release of documents for the sake of releasing them.” However she later described the release as “a reflection of, I think, what’s some of the worst of the Internet and social networking, that it simply throws things up against the wall like spaghetti to see what will stick.”
DeYoung pointed out that WikiLeaks representatives maintained that they were motivated by a desire to shed light on unsavory government practices. But, she stressed, WikiLeaks representatives “themselves did not analyze what they thought was immoral or illegal, or point out what in these documents would support that thesis.” In her view, journalists have “a responsibility to look at what’s done with information” as well as to put it into context.
According to Shane, after obtaining cables from WikiLeaks, journalists from The New York Times worked with the State Department to redact the texts before they were published. Most of what Times’ editors agreed to remove consisted of “names and identities of people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats in what you would consider to be repressive countries.” The State Department also persuaded the Times not to publish information about a sensitive intelligence-cooperation program involving another country.
In cases where State Department officials raised objections based on concerns that the material might cause diplomatic embarrassment, the Times was disinclined to withhold publication, Shane said.
Shane observed that while in some cases the release stained US relations with foreign countries, in other instances “you saw Secretary of State Clinton and others using these revelations to the advantage of the United States.” For example, after the details regarding Arab leaders’ private expressions of concern about Iran’s nuclear program became known, US officials “began to say, geez, you know, it’s interesting to see we’re not alone; we and Israel are not alone in being fearful about this,” Shane noted.
Shane added that while some American diplomats expressed concern that the release would make their jobs more difficult, “many people that I spoke with were impressed with the general quality of their work, the quality of their writing and their reporting.” Shane particularly cited the account of “a wedding in Dagestan in the Caucasus” as being “a wild, thoroughly reported and extremely entertaining account.” In Shane’s view, the diplomat “was certainly doing a service in trying to tell Washington, you know, here’s part of Russia. It’s a volatile part of Russia. You know, the dictator of Chechnya came to the wedding with his entourage and supposedly left a five-kilogram lump of gold as his wedding present.”
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.
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