Morning Snip:
Dissent and Vandalism
In The New Yorker, Steve Coll assesses the murkiness that has been stirred up by Julian Assange’s Wild-West, anarchic brand of journalism.
If the organization continues to attract sources and vast caches of unfiltered secret documents, it will have to steer through the foggy borderlands between dissent and vandalism, and it will have to defend its investigative journalism against those who perceive it as a crime. Assange is animated by the idea of radical transparency, but WikiLeaks as yet lacks a fixed address. Nor does it offer its audiences any mechanism for its own accountability. If the organization were an insurgency, these characteristics might be in its nature. Assange declares that he is pioneering an improved, daring form of journalism. That profession, however, despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law. The Times and the Washington Post, in successfully defending their decision to publish the Pentagon Papers before the Supreme Court, extended considerably the political impact of their revelations.