Why Glenn Greenwald’s new media venture is a big deal [View all]

[dkf]

@chrislhayes: This is extremely astute http://t.co/IpHTYfTffu

Why Glenn Greenwald’s new media venture is a big deal
By Henry Farrell, Published: OCTOBER 17, 11:34 AM ET

Glenn Greenwald, who has published many of the most important scoops from the Edward Snowden leaks, is leaving The Guardian and setting up a new media venture with long-time journalist Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill from The Nation. The venture is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has suggested that he’s prepared to invest more than $250 million in the new venture.

This is big news for journalism. It’s also big news for people interested in the relationship between information technology and politics. Martha Finnemore and I drafted a paper a couple of years ago about how Wikileaks-type organizations were changing the relationship between knowledge, politics and hypocrisy. Our ideas about hypocrisy led to an article on the true consequences of the Snowden leaks, which is coming out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs. Our ideas about knowledge and politics maybe tell us something about the consequences of the new venture (but bear with me -- our argument is a little complicated).

Fundamentally, we think that much of the commentary about Wikileaks and Snowden’s revelations are wrong. Most people think that Wikileaks, Snowden etc. are politically important because they reveal secret information that was hitherto unknown. Many of Wikileaks’ defenders, including, initially, Julian Assange himself, thought that the organization would change politics and bring down corrupt regimes by revealing information that the government wanted to hide. The critics of Snowden and Wikileaks actually agree -- they argue that they have hurt America (and perhaps the world) by revealing information that should have stayed secret.

Neither are right. Neither Wikileaks or Snowden has revealed any truly surprising and damaging information. European and South American governments already knew that the U.S. was spying on them. China was certainly aware that U.S. agencies were trying to hack into its systems. On the other hand, Assange’s initial hope that he could change the world through publishing damaging information turned out to be completely unfounded. Wikileaks had a very frustrating time trying to get anyone except bloggers to pay attention to their early revelations. No one seemed to care.

The reason why is important. There’s too much information out there for most people to pay attention to, let alone figure out whether they believe it or not. Hence, most people rely on other institutions such as media organizations to tell them which information is worth caring about. Not only do people not pay much attention to information until it gets the stamp of approval from some authoritative institution, but this information is transformed, because everybody knows that everybody else is paying attention to it. It stops being mere information, and becomes knowledge -- generally accepted facts that people use to build their understanding of what everybody knows about politics.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/17/why-glenn-greenwalds-new-media-venture-is-a-big-deal/