Hailing Assange as free-press hero is crap

Reflections on LeWeb and WikiLeaks

I’m flying home from beautiful Paris, with its exquisite architecture, glorious cuisine, amazing shopping, its plethora of art museums, and heart-stopping views along the Seine, to go home to Sacramento, affectionately known to the locals as Crapramento.  And I’ve been reflecting on this year’s LeWeb event, and the one panel that really stood out to me: the Media Panel.  The panelists discussed the major issue of the day: WikiLeaks, and what stood out to me was the panelists’ overwhelming and unwavering support for WikiLeaks.

Pierre Chappaz, CEO of Wikio, was the most vocal in his support for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as well as his concerns for what the censorship of WikiLeaks means for journalism.

“This affects all of the world’s press,” said Chappaz, who pointed out that once the censorship door is open, everything can fall prey to it. 

The other panelists, which included Weblogs SL founder Julio Alonso, Senior VP and GM of CNN.com Kenneth Estenson, Founder and CEO of Techmeme Gabe Rivera, and technology editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe Ben Rooney, mused on the trumped up charges against Assange and spoke of the WikiLeaks founder as a hero of journalism.  And that, as far as I’m concerned, is the whole problem with WikiLeaks. 

It’s worth noting that none of the panelists were political reporters or war correspondents.  The issue of diplomacy or foreign relations never even came up in the conversation.  The focus was on the romantic ideal that Julian Assange embodies: the champion of transparency and truth-telling. 

This is the romantic ideal that God knows how many hackers around the world are now trying to cash in on by launching DDoS attacks against the major corporations that turned their backs on WikiLeaks.  (A hacker attacking a corporation?  Who knew?)

But the bigger issue, I think, is what WikiLeaks actually means from a journalistic standpoint.  What is the purpose of journalism and the free press?  To keep the flow of information circulating and to hold public figures accountable for their actions.

But WikiLeaks, itself, engaged in censorship.  Before the cables were leaked, some (not all) of the names of foreign diplomatic sources who could be vulnerable to political persecution in their countries were edited out of the text.  Only Assange and a few others in the WikiLeaks group, along with those involved in the actual diplomatic exchanges, know the names of these individuals.  Thus, WikiLeaks, itself, acknowledges that a line must be drawn somewhere.  Total and unabated transparency of the kind WikiLeaks proposes to stand for would be a wonderful idea if ALL of the world’s governments were rational, free of corruption, and committed to upholding basic human rights and civil liberties, but that’s not the case. 

So where do we draw the line?  The censhorship-free world that the media panelists at LeWeb envision requires an all-or-nothing commitment, but the world is much more complicated than that.  For God’s sake, basic human interaction is more complicated than that (I think your sweater is repulsive but I’m not going to blurt that out the minute I see you for the sake of transparency and a refusal to engage in self-censorship).  I’m not arguing for censorship; I’m arguing for tact and sensitivity, as well as a realistic approach to international dialogue and diplomacy, which means eschewing romantic idealism.  

Image source: boingboing.net