WikiLeaks or WikiLedes?

[NYT correspondent Mark] MAZZETTI: Well, as a reporter, you're very rarely confronted with this amount of information, and so it's almost - it's the reverse of the situation you're normally in, which is too little information. Here, we are confronted with such a volume of information that it's hard to make sense of it and it's hard to know how to - which parts to emphasize and which parts not to.  NPR transcript

If nothing else, the WikiLeaks exposure should test the claims of journalists and bloggers with regard to the quality of their attention to data. 


Journalists still pretend they own the space of creating/reporting news. Bloggers will continue to contend that without intelligent and ethically responsible interpretation of what is reported, the journalistic niche doesn't amount to very much.


An actual journalist would rename WikiLeaks to WikiLedes - because the 92,000 or so documents are so many leads (or ledes) into the complex world of the Afghan war, and this is a relatively small set of documents (the NYT calls it "exhaustive," but probably just means "exhausting").


 What Mr. Mazzetti points to as exceptional is in fact the normal case: the actual data out there for any story are potentially infinite. Newsmen deal with digested digests, rarely with the raw. But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not.


Wikileaks exposes the abbreviative power of news media. Faced with something like the complexity of the real, Mr. Mazzetti thought he was dealing with something unusual. He was not. The gap between the NYT accounts of Afghanistan before WikiLeaks, and the density of the documents now available is vast. What Mr. Mazzetti and the NYT are looking at is the abyss that is always there in any bit of actuality, but which their customary defenses have always dealt with deftly and obliviously. They'll need a new set of defenses if the leaks keep coming.


The Times had three weeks or more to examine the documents. Others now have more leisure, and might find more there than the Times did. And pursue different inquiries. On Democracy Now, Julian Assange raises a question about the Pentagon's decision to fire up a criminal investigation into the source(s) of the Wikileaks material:

Why is it that an investigation is announced to go into the source, before an investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct that is revealed by this material? DN

Wikileaks is lifting two veils: one on the war, the other -- perhaps more significant -- on the unreality of everyday journalism, the fictional, smooth, clear narrative arcs of the Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc.


After cataract surgery, the eyes can be sensitive to light.

The irrevolution will be televised

The Colbert - Assange "interview" is remarkable for its confluence of horror and televisible humor. It offers suppressed information about an apparent war crime, which, moved into the open, is discussed with comedic flair. The revelation involves the deaths of Iraqi citizens, harmed children, chuckling US soldiers. Assange of Wikileaks is allegedly concerned for his personal welfare.

Something seems shared here, in the provocative binding of the release of forbidden knowledge with comedy. At the very least, there's a trust, both in emancipators of repressed realities and in comedy's preference for the vernacular, that bringing something out into the public light of day will be better than keeping it secret. Indeed Colbert riffs on that theme in the segment. For Freud, jokes find socially performable ways to liberate the hostile and the obscene.

One common element between intelligence leaks and laughter is surrender of control. As forbidden speech is uttered, those who wished it to remain unspoken lose their power over it, and over the conditions of ignorance enabled by its suppression. When a comedian climbing a ladder suddenly finds the ladder heading backward to the floor, his situation is similar -- the crash is the explosion of the unforeseeable surprise, the force of the punch line.

Though here, the force derives from the detonation of an artificial stranglehold on what is true. As Zizek has noted:

Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.  

The rhetorical features of parody -- sober, straight-faced presentation of something too absurd to be real -- are pressed into the service of its inverse: This time, the truth is not a hoax, the tongue-in-cheek presentation strangely melds with the horror of war that is always unfamiliar to the public whose soldiers are waging it somewhere else. In all comic seriousness, it's not unlike an April Fool's jape coming home to roost.