The media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks

[Jefferson23]

Friday, Dec 10, 2010 09:43 ET

By Glenn Greenwald (updated below - Update II - Update III)

After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time's WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) -- and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger -- the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a "correction." In reality, the "correction" is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism.

Initially, note that Time has refused to correct its blatantly false claim that WikiLeaks has published "thousands of classified State Department cables" and posted "thousands of secret diplomatic cables" when, in reality, they've posted only 1,269 of the more than 250,000 cables they possess: less than 1/2 of 1 %. It's true that they provided roughly 251,000 cables to five newspapers, but they have only "posted" and "published" roughly 1,200 of them. Time just decided to leave that statement standing even knowing it is factually false.

More significant is the "correction" itself. It applies to Time's clearly false claim of "a distinction between WikiLeaks' indiscriminate posting of the cables . . . and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times." That is false because WikiLeaks' release of cables had not been "indiscriminate" in any sense of the word. As this AP article documents -- and as a casual review of its site independently proves -- WikiLeaks has done very little other than publish the specific cables that have been first released by newspapers around the world, including with the redactions applied by those papers.

So did Time correct its false statement by acknowledging its unquestionable falsity and pointing to the evidence disproving it? Of course not. Instead, they merely noted this at the bottom of the article: "Correction: The story has been amended to reflect the fact that Assange rejects claims that WikiLeaks has 'indiscriminately' dumped documents on its site." They also added to the body of the article a sentence noting that "claims that Assange has simply dumped the documents without reviewing them, much like a traditional editor would, have been disputed" because "Assange himself told TIME that each diplomatic cable his site has published has been vetted by his own team or by the editors of newspapers with whom he has shared the documents."

remainder: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/10/wikileaks_media/index.html

[xocet]

1. K & R n/t

[truedelphi]

2. How can our Mainstream Media be anything other than authoritarian?

The CIA has spent the last forty years insuring that only CIA assets are promoted to positions of power.

Now someone like Katie Couric might not have actually signed on as CIA. But as long as she doesn't rock the boat and do anything that her bosses ask her politely not to do, all is well with her career. (Ms Couric pointed out shortly before the 2008 election that she had formulated some hard hitting questions for George W Bush during an interview with that man several years earlier. But she revealed that she had deferred to people in power at her network when they frowned on her asking those questions.)

Stories that run in the mainstream media are controlled heavily by CIA influences, heavily controlled by any of the Big Players, that is, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurers and Hospitals, Big Financial Institutions. And Department of Defense. About the only way a network can tell the truth is to run endless stories focusing on celebrities!