The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of Wikileaks is that they have read or heard about the material that Wikileaks has helped to make public. The CBS program "60 Minutes" has just published video of an interview with Wikileaks' Julian Assange -- with the video focused, of course, on Assange himself, with almost no substantive content related to the massive crimes and abuses that have made news around the globe.
The value of the "60 Minutes" video is not in its potential to inform anyone about Wikileaks. We can't, after all, judge the utility of informing Americans about their nation's illegal spying, bombing, war making, or coup facilitating until Americans are actually informed of it, which will require that we finally drop the BS "reporting" on Assange's childhood and haircuts.
The value of the "60 Minutes" video is in its potential to inform us about CBS and the corporate media in the United States, of which it is a typical or even above average example. 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft shot six hours of interview with Assange, which "60 Minutes" cut down to snippets for tv viewing. Some decent questions may have been asked. If so, they didn't make the cut.
Kroft tries desperately in the interview to distinguish Assange from respectable journalists. At one point he explains to Assange that most reporters interpret information, whereas Wikileaks puts out raw data for others to interpret. Of course, this isn't true of Wikileaks, which has often provided context and explanations, transcriptions and timelines. What it hasn't done is pile ideological spin and fluff on the information it has sought to communicate.
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1 comment:
Honestly, I wish the "news" would just put out the raw data for us to interpret instead of adding their "context" aka spin.
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