

If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame - nextparadigms
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/07/if-wikileaks-is-dying-then-the-nyt-is-partly-to-blame

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ars
"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection"

No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted
information.

It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks
would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up.

This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange doesn't like. No
thank you. Wikileaks should not get to choose what to leak. Either leak
everything you are given (after redaction of course), or nothing, do not
selectively choose who to leak against.

Once you do that you become a political organization.

~~~
bandushrew
hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic
Purity aside, WikiLeaks _was_ a journalistic entity and _did_ deserve our
protection.

We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally
decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like.

What kills me about this is that people seem to _support_ that status quo.
Lots of mumbling about how wikileaks should have redacted <whatever> and no
outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced by our
government as soon as it suited them.

~~~
asdfasdghasdf
I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You
can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them
as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US
government (that's not to say it wasn't).

Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the
fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the embassy
cable leak (<http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html>). Of course, they
haven't done anything interesting since then, either. Look at their own
charts, and you see that their income is heavily correlated with major
releases (etc. Collateral Murder in April, Embassy cables in December) and
their current donations don't look that far removed from, say, September or
May 2010.

Even their own financial statements
([http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-
Projekt04_de...](http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-
Projekt04_de.pdf)) say that most of their money came wire transfer (which is
still possible and fully legal). This is definitely more an issue of people
not wanting to donate than it is being not able to. Obviously, the best way to
raise more funds would be to do more high-profile work; WikiLeaks is choosing
to shut down all their high profile work.

You say the government shut them down, but in fact they shut themselves down,
as your parent comment mentions. They shut down their super-useful, award-
winning site (eventually to be put back up as a read-only archive at
<http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks>) and re-purposed themselves entirely
to hyping up the five things they got from Brad Manning. Now, they're out of
money, they're out of juicy Brad Manning leaks, they haven't even been
_accepting_ anything new since they shut themselves down, and so they're gonna
drum up their little government-conspiracy thing that they do very, very well,
to try to raise some more money.

~~~
bandushrew
So your argument is that the arrest and ongoing prosecution of Assange(sp?),
the shutdown of services from paypal++, visa, master card, bank of america,
Western Union and Amazon had pretty much no noticeable effect on donations,
was not the result of a coordinated effort by the US government and the _real_
reason donations are down is because they haven't released any more leaks?

sounds entirely plausible to me. would you like to buy a bridge?

++Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that
the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as
through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account.

~~~
asdfasdghasdf
You're obviously exaggerating what I said for effect, but that's the gist of
it, yeah.

I didn't mention his sex crime accusations, and I only said that there's no
actual evidence that the US government directly influenced Visa and
Mastercard. Surely it's possible Visa, MasterCard, etc. made their decisions
on their own, but I honestly don't know, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a
"favor."

But for the rest, the numbers speak for themselves, and it's pretty much
common sense. Everytime there's major leak, they got a ton of money. They've
haven't been publishing, they're not getting attention, nobody's donating to
them. From their own charts, they made more in post-blockade February '11 than
they did in pre-blockade Sep '10. Again, _most_ of their 2010 money... more
than 50% of all their money came through channels that are still totally
available.

It is true that they were taking in more with PayPal than through transfers
before December. There's obviously no way to know how much of potential paypal
donations were lost versus replaced by wire donations, but it remains that
_most_ of their money in 2010 came from transfers. In December, about 2/3s of
it came from transfers. The steep drop-off from December to January in their
charts has nothing to do with the blockade, right? They got 398,365.60EUR
through wire transfer in December and (estimating from their charts) about 20K
in January. Is that not clearly just interest from the embassy cables dying
down?

They're claiming they've lost out on "tens of millions of pounds" because of
this 'blockade.' That is a __ridiculous __number, considering they made just
more than 1M last year. Somehow they expected to average more than twice that
every _month_? Despite not publishing any new sources of material? Or even
_accepting_ any new material? Ridiculous.

This is an organization that accepted credit card payments for __46 DAYS __and
they're coming on like Visa and Mastercard are ruining them?

Everything Wikileaks has done since Assange started talking with Brad Manning
has been hyped-up, conspiracy-theory, drama-queen publicity stunt and this
'financial blockade' is no exception.

Tell me more about this bridge you have, though.

~~~
bandushrew
heh. Thats a good response, thanks.

I do wonder whether transfers work if your bank account has been frozen?

They _are_ drama queen-ish though, I agree. Luckily that doesn't stop them
from being a journalistic entity.

~~~
asdfasdghasdf
As they mention on their Banking Blockade site, the Treasury found no reason
to put them on their blacklist, and nobody has frozen their bank accounts.

I agree they're a 'journalistic entity' -- whatever that means. I was only
rebuffing when you said "We have just established a precedent that the US
government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that
reports news it doesn't like."

Their webpage is still up. Assange is still making cheesy videos where he
tells you how terrible the world is. It's still legal for you to donate.
Nobody has accused them of committing any crime. A handful of US companies
decided not to do business with them, but with only circumstantial evidence of
government influence. There were certainly no judges involved.

Wikileaks shut themselves down to new submissions a year and a half ago when
they started pushing Brad Manning leaks, and they've done nothing but hype up
and politicize those leaks since. Now they're whining that nobody's donating
to a whistleblower site that doesn't accept whistleblowing. They shut
themselves down.

In no way did the US government unilaterally decide to shut anyone down.
They're still allowed to operate, and just drama-queening that they're shut
down. If the government _were_ to try to shut down a news organization just
because it didn't agree with them, there definitely would be a gigantic
backlash.

------
vph
Reading this article several times, I really failed to see a clear logic from
the author as to why the supposed dying of Wikileaks is the NYT's fault.

~~~
grandalf
[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than
simply downvote?]

In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times
published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend
Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom.

It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose
Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs and desire to please
those with political power.

Think about when the last time the NY Times published any remotely
controversial investigative journalism... oh yeah it was the articles that
_supported_ the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Strangely, the Times (a good but ardently neoconservative) paper still manages
to fool progressives into thinking that it offers a sympathetic voice. Sadly
the pressures of competing in the online world have left the paper with no
choice but to sell off its journalistic integrity year after year.

If anything, one would hope that a paper like the Times would have taken a
skeptical but journalistically sharp look at the leaked info and would have
held off on the ad hominem attack on the Wikileaks founder, at least until
some evidence was offered in support of the allegations against him.

And no, I don't think the total buffoonery written by Krugman, Dowd, and
Herbert counts for any progressiveness points. If anything the three are a
sideshow act with no relevance to the issues that matter.

~~~
starwed
You're downvoted for pretending controversial opinions (that the nytimes is a
neoconservative stronghold) are obvious and need no justification.

------
rrrazdan
The truth even if it causes some harm, is always infinitely better than a lie,
even if it helps someone. That is my position.

------
ternaryoperator
There will be many causes for Wikileaks' death (if in fact it does in fact
die). None more damaging though than the damage Wikileaks did to itself.
Leaving unredacted the names of informants who were later executed for
providing the very information Wikileaks posted clinched its fate IMO.

~~~
X-Istence
[citation needed]

I haven't read any information regarding sources being executed.

~~~
ternaryoperator
I stand corrected. There's no proof any source has been killed, but the
Taliban has repeatedly vowed to hunt down and "punish" the sources not
redacted in the Wikileaks docs. Many links on that on the Web.

