Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

At the start of this month I suggested that Rolling Stone’s McChrystal expose was the story of the year. I was wrong. Whistleblowing website Wikileaks’s release of more than 75,000 classified military documents — collectively referred to as the Afghanistan war logs — is now the story everyone is talking about, and it is unlikely this will change anytime soon.

A security breach/freeing of information (as you like) such as this is pretty much unprecedented, although many are comparing it to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (including Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind that leak).

Just as with the Pentagon Papers, the leak and the subsequent publication of previously classified information are just part of a complex knot of stories. Who leaked this? What do we make of what we read? What next for Afghanistan, for the US military and indeed for ISAF as a whole? — these are only the immediate questions.

Last night I attended the Frontline Club’s sell-out Q and A with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. I wanted to get closer to the story and explore a few of my own questions, specifically — How does a leak like this affect the life cycle of a story and the role of the press? What next for news and investigative journalism if Wikileaks steps in as the official sourcer of unofficial facts? Further, what are the ethics around what Wikileaks is doing — both Assange as an individual and the organisation as a whole?

I don’t believe in censorship and I do believe in freedom of information, but no matter how I look at this, none of it is black and white.

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