WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.

In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.

Apparentely The New Yorker chose a really good time to publish a 10,000-word feature about Julian Assange. The story “No Secrets” by Raffi Khatchadourian was published on 6/7/10, the day before the news broke about Manning. I’m extremely interested in Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, but I was still surprised when I got sucked into this article. Assange is a fascinating character — the type of person who you don’t usually hear about because governments hate him so much. But he’ll likely be an important figure in the time ahead, so I wanted to present excerpts from the story in a convenient run-down.

On the hope for a new “scientific journalism” and their approach to the Apache helicopter footage:

If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.’ Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film ‘Permission to Engage,’ but ultimately decided on something more forceful: ‘Collateral Murder.’ He told Gonggrijp, ‘We want to knock out this “collateral damage” euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think “collateral murder.”’

On Assange’s upbringing and self-directed education:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. ‘I didn’t want their spirits broken,’ she told me. …[Assange] took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled.

This bit shows a prominent aspect of WikiLeaks in its formative stage. Assange was arrested in 1991 for hacking with a group that went by the name “The International Subversives”:

‘Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,’ Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. ‘He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.’

On Assanges’ budding life philosophy and the need for an organization that would foster information leaks:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by ‘patronage networks’—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.’ He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

On realizing the shortcomings of traditional journalism and mass media:

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—’a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,’ as he once put it. …in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, ‘We are not the press.’ He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, ‘the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.’

On WikiLeaks’ main objectives:

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, ‘Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.’

On justifying the potential for damage:

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important.

Khatchadourian’s skeptical remarks about the long-term tenacity of WikiLeaks:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

On objective and subjective approaches to journalism:

‘It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,’ [Assange] told me. But he also said, ‘To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.’

You can read the entire feature here.

Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter requested permission to shoot down these “targets” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.

I did enjoy learning about the Zeitoun family though. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American man who settled in New Orleans after about a decade of living and working at sea. A friend introduced him to his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native who was raised Southern Baptist but had converted to Islam on her own. Kathy has a son from a previous marriage, and she and Zeitoun (as everyone calls Abdulrahman) have three daughters together. In my opinion, Eggers’s focus on this quintessential “American” family is the strongest aspect of the book. The result was that I learned more about Islam than I had ever known before.

It was especially interesting to see why Kathy converted. Her best friend Yuko (a Japanese American) first made the switch from Christianity to Islam, and eventually it began to make sense to Kathy as well.

“[Kathy] had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible – Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testament…the Psalms…and the New Testament. The fact that Islam acknowledged these books was revelatory for her. The fact that the Qur’an repeatedly reaches out to the other, related faiths, knocked her flat” (p. 71).

“She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?” (p. 76)

I felt just as frustrated! That part about the Qur’an being the fourth book of God was news to me, and I’m sure it would be to most Americans practicing (or raised under) some denomination of Christianity. It’s even more odd when I recall that I went to high school with Muslim students, and at one point they even gave a short presentation to classes to encourage mutual understanding and tolerance (not that there were many outward displays of bigotry at the suburban Detroit school).

Kathy learned that Mohammad wasn’t the Islamic god (he was just a messenger), Qur’an simply means “Recitation,” and Muslims are just as different as the various types of people who identify as Christians. Meanwhile her Southern Baptist preacher scolded the congregation for not giving more money at collection time. And when Kathy spoke to him about how she was considering a conversion to Islam, the preacher said she was being tempted by the devil. Later at church, he brought her on stage and publicly humiliated her over the issue. That was Kathy’s breaking point.

“This man, preaching to a thousand impressionable and trusting parishioners, didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were not-so-distantly related branches of the same monotheistic, Abrahamic faith. And to dismiss all of Islam with a playground sound? Kathy could not be part of what that man was preaching” (p. 76).

Kathy was also tiring of the Southern Baptist claim to ultimate knowledge. She sought something more humble and noble.

“The various doubts of the imams* were comforting, and drew her closer. [...] She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew” (pp. 76-77). (*An imam is an Islamic religious leader)

All of this sounded refreshing amid the recent flashes of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity — the former in the Middle East and the latter in the U.S. But I soon saw that, like the other monotheistic religions, even liberal Islam is susceptible to irrationality and blatantly reliant on a personified God.

Consistently throughout the book, Zeitoun and Kathy thank God, pray to God, and abandon their reason to the wisdom of God. Zeitoun stays in New Orleans during and after Katrina in part because he feels that God wants him to be there to help the people (and dogs) in need. But in a way, it was a justification for his own stubbornness, not wanting to leave his property, not wanting to be stuck with four displaced females, not wanting to miss an opportunity to live up to his famous older brother (the brother was a decorated ocean swimmer in Syria, who later died in a car accident).

Never do they admit the chaos, randomness and coincidence that dominate every aspect of the story. The individual has no control whatsoever, but at the same time no one is in charge. Yes, Zeitoun did good things, but he almost ended up dead (or close to it — I won’t give away that part!).

There are a few other points from the book I’d like to discuss, but those will have to wait until a future post.

Michigan Radio and Generation Y Michigan are inviting the audience to submit guest essays for publication on this website. If you’d like to publish an essay, please send it as an attachment to generationymichigan@umich.edu. Make sure to include “Generation Y Michigan Essay” in the subject line. We encourage you to provide a short bio (40-80 words), contact email (if different than the one used for submission), and a photo of yourself.

We are still working out the specifics of this new aspect of the project, and we don’t have too many requirements at this time. The essay should focus on the topic of young adults in Michigan, and the reasons why they would move to, stay in or leave the state. These can be based on personal experience, observation, interviews or research. The length should fall in the range of 500-2,000 words, with some flexibility. Your essay should be an elaboration on a theme or idea — in other words, please don’t submit a list of pros or cons about Michigan. Feel free to include an image to go with your essay, as long as you created it or you have the right to use it (include a link to the original image if it’s a Creative Commons photo from Flickr or a free-use image from a stock photo website like Stock.xchng).

At this time guest essays will not appear on the front page of Generation Y Michigan. However, they will be published under a Guest Essays tab in the site navigation and the Recent Posts box in the site sidebar. Essays will be subject to the terms of Michigan Radio’s User Agreement, specifically in regard to discrimination and hate speech. Michigan Radio will not edit the content of essays, but we may make grammatical corrections according to AP Style.

GenerationYMichigan.org is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA license. By submitting, the author agrees to have the essay published under the conditions of this license. These contributor requirements are subject to change at any time.

Second was the news summit “In Search of a New Journalism,” hosted by the MSU J-School on Monday, May 11. I had hoped to attend, but my car broke down on the highway near Jackson. Luckily they’re hosting “on demand” video from the event on their website (turn on the player, click “On Demand” at the bottom, go to “Journalism Department,” and you’ll find “Rethinking News” parts 1 and 2).

I’ll try to provide a brief synopsis of State of Play without giving away too much. Russel Crowe and Rachel McAdams play a veteran reporter and blogger (respectively) at an established D.C. newspaper (a fictionalized version of The Washington Post). A few murder cases end up connected to a political scandal, and they work together to uncover the truth of the matter.

The movie was excellent, and yet, after the fact, I can’t say that I especially liked Crowe’s character or the outcome of the story. All throughout the film, I kept thinking of a saying from my Journalism Ethics class. I don’t remember it exactly, but I can paraphrase: “Journalism is kind of like making sausage: the more you know about the process, the less appetizing the final product seems.” (Some of you may have seen me reference this in my essay about journalism published on Supraterranean in Sept 2008).

Crowe’s journalist goes way beyond what might be called ethical practices while researching and reporting the story, but for the majority of the film, his actions do seem somewhat justified. Unfortunately, it was one of those films where the last five minutes determined my opinion of the entire movie. I don’t mean that it was a let down. It has more to do with the portrayal of the journalists’ actions. I felt that they hadn’t accomplished as much as I had expected them to, or as much as the filmmakers made it out to be.

It seemed like they were trying to create a modernized version of All the President’s Men. That was a 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman that documented the reporting efforts of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in uncovering the Watergate Scandal. The real journalists were primarily responsible for Nixon’s resignation. And according to my Ethics professor, the film was responsible for the biggest wave of student enrollments in university journalism programs up to that point in time.

The main difference between SoP and AtPM, though, is that the latter was based on true events, events that had a concrete effect on and meaning to our country (and probably the world). SoP, on the other hand, is based off a British television series and — as far as I can tell — is fictional. There have been events, companies, and newspapers like the ones in the film, but that’s irrelevant to my point.

Without ruining the ending, I’ll say that the journalists do accomplish quite a bit, but not as much as I wanted them to. But that was by no fault of their own; it was (I would argue) indicative of a fundamental flaw in journalism. Metaphorically, even if the “sausage” tastes yummy, it still requires the messy butchering and grinding — and most of the time the indigestion it brings overrules the enjoyment of eating it. Literally, the personal grief, ethical dilemmas, and organizational struggles hardly ever amount to the kind of payoff that is needed. What I mean is, the “Nixons” usually get off without a resignation.

Woodward and Bernstein were the exception to the rule, and that’s why they’ve been glorified throughout the years. In reality, journalism is a very limited practice, albeit a noble one. I would argue that knowing the limitations of journalism can help one bridge beyond it (but that takes me back to Hunter Thompson’s claim that fiction is capable of being more “true” than journalism).

As this digital age progresses, journalism is undergoing a strange transfiguration. Last year the newspaper industry all but folded. Many organizations have built respectable websites, but the ad revenue isn’t always enough to be sustainable. In my opinion, these are all signs that journalism will have a non-profit future or no future at all.

Many disagree with me. Still more wonder if journalists are even necessary anymore. It’s painfully obvious that citizens using Twitter and other social media can distribute information to the public faster than any traditional media organization. This brings me back to the “New Journalism” summit. I watched the video footage, and one recurring theme (introduced by John Bebow of Mlive.com) was that the public can now handle four out of six primary functions of journalism. Regular citizens are perfectly capable of disseminating the who, what, when, and where. That leaves the why and how for journalists to handle.

Meanwhile the journalism industry is going through a panicked ego-frenzy as they try to reestablish a sense of control over their vocation. They feel that they know better than the public how to handle information. They think it’s possible to get people to pay subscription fees to get access to content, in exchange for professionalism and trustworthiness. They claim that publishing can regain its foothold if they only figure out the perfect marketing and PR strategies. They are unmistakably wrong on all those fronts.

They’re wrong, but they’re not useless or unnecessary. What it all comes down to is control. Media organizations can no longer control the flow of information, no matter how much they want to — and they want to very badly, especially the big players in the content industry like News Corp. Their ability to control, interpret, manipulate, and spread news and information was a key component of their power. Now their control has been relinquished, and (because of this and a few other main reasons) their power is draining.

What I’m getting at is bigger and more complicated than just the death of the print industry. It relates to the decentralization and dissolution of power in general. Power should never be too concentrated because it breeds corruption. And no matter how silly you think Facebook and Twitter are, the primary truth is that they are open public forums, directed, predicted, censored, and controlled by no one.

At one point in the news conference, MSU J-School professor Dave Poulson exalted the wisdom of the crowd. An opposite point could be made (in fact it has been made throughout the history of literature and philosophy), but that doesn’t discredit the idea, especially when talking about information and not opinions. His more interesting claim was that the chaos of the crowd is extremely exciting from a journalistic perspective. His reasoning was that journalists must step in to mediate the discussion and make sense of the madness — in other words, to fulfill the need for the why and how.

Poulson’s suggestion mirrors my own feeling, but while the idea is new and uncomfortable to many print traditionalists, it really suggests what journalism has always tried to be. Its primary function is to provide citizens with the information they require to be free and self-governing. Now, journalism will achieve its purpose more than ever before, and I believe we’ll all be better off because of it.

Here’s the official trailer for State of Play: