“Just the Facts, ma’am” is another way of saying “Just the Documents.”
December 14th, 2010
Hitler won this award once...
We at Silver Underground are pretty thrilled Julian Assange of whistleblowing site, Wikileaks, came out in a distant lead in Time Magazine’s Poll for the 2010 Person of the Year. He displays a courage that I hope the rest of us will someday show when the chance is upon us. However, others cast him in a more dubious light.
Beyond the silly neocon circus which has alternatively called for his assassination, extradition or puzzlingly, punishment for treason, now the Obama administration has levied the charge that Julian Assange has a political agenda, and “that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.”
Let’s skip all of that metaphysical neutral observer business and get into how journalistic perspective is pretty much all relative. You might be overtly partisan, cheerleading one of America’s favorite sports teams, er, political parties, like Keith Olbermann or the Faux News crew. Maybe your job is to be completely irrelevant and make people think only things of marginal importance are happening like Ted Turner’s CNN network does. Maybe you are thoroughly establishment, which means finding the middleground between those sports teams like NPR does, and, pretending it is profound, marginalize paradigms outside of that narrow scale. Maybe you’re a libertarian blogger with an obvious ax to grind, but I’m skeptical that there even are disinterested journalists without a stake in the game who report on anything above the blue ribbon winners of the biggest pumpkin contest at the county fair.
The concept of “just the facts, ma’am” almost seems outdated in our modern age. Do journalists even behave that way anymore? If anyone does, its Wikileaks. Now, calling a video “Collateral Murder” is absolutely editorializing and falls into this same trap, but the mere act of releasing primary sources to be reviewed by all journalists and citizens as with cablegate has no editorial value except the truth.
So if the Obama administration means to say that Wikileaks has lost its establishment journalistic integrity by revealing the necessary data for all individuals to decide for themselves what is happening its because in 2010, few journalists are doing that. Instead Americans are inundated with authorized statist messages which all serve the interests of the status quo power structure. Wikileaks brilliantly violates this trend and is an anomaly amongst “journalists” and the media.
“Just the facts” in the digital age is another way of saying “just the documents,” and thus Wikileaks does not fit the standard mold of today’s journalists as per Obama’s dictum, and aren’t you thankful for it? We are!
