Comments on: The consensus on WikiLeaks: there is no consensus. But consider the ethics

By: online editorial system

online editorial system — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 13:40:46 +0000

I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz respond as I’m looking to construct my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. kudos
Wow! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same layout and design. Great choice of colors!

By: Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 03:19:01 +0000

Thanks for adding the correction to the post. Cheers.

By: Scott Leadingham

Scott Leadingham — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:40:31 +0000

Hi, Jay Rosen (and everyone else).
FYI – I added the above correction/update at the beginning of the blog post at the request of SPJ President Hagit Limor. She has been traveling today (as have I and others on the SPJ staff), and I couldn’t update the post until this evening. Thanks for pointing out the initial numerical error, and thanks to Craig Silverman at CJR for the good online piece prompting the full correction. Normally we would add such clarification in the first place, but it apparently didn’t happen this time. I sincerely apologize for the oversight. There was no ill-intent intended. Also, to clarify your original comments on this blog not going through: that was entirely a product of the WordPress filter. There is no active comment moderation other than the spam filter for WordPress. Sometimes it picks ups legitimate comments for some strange reason, and we have to manually approve those. (I’ve done it several times after commenters e-mailed me to say their comments were filtered as spam.) Again, no harm intended, and your comments were taken out of the spam filter as soon as we noticed.

Again, thanks, and I hope all is well in New York.
Best,
Scott Leadingham
Quill Editor
SPJ Communications Director

By: robert green

robert green — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:22:23 +0000

the continuing comedy here is that now, having been forced kicking and screaming to correct the magnitude of 100 error in the opening paragraph, the author has missed one other salient point: the correction obviates the entire argument. eviscerates it. exsanguinates it. leaves it without air except of the hot variety.

see, you had an argument built, essentially around conflating “not vetting things” with “not being a journalist”. but your talking point was a lie created by and perpetuated by (and almost, absent people-who-you-would-not-call-journalists pointing it out, institutionalized by) journalists, no need for a qualifier. but you FINALLY made the correction and then just blithely pretended you still had a point in your opening graf. you didn’t. you don’t.

so the sickness is the opposite of what you think it is. the problem isn’t definitional, it’s that your profession brings shame to itself every day, and your society is doing nothing to help.

By: Graham Shevlin

Graham Shevlin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:06:58 +0000

This article has been updated to say “2,000 cables” instead of the original “quarter of a million cables”, without an UPDATE or CORRECTION addendum at the bottom.
What sort of message does that send about accuracy and accountability?

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 05:01:32 +0000

I fail to see the benefit for defining who a journalist is. I’m a journalist, I don’t get any special treatment. In fact, there are times when reporting would be a lot easier if people didn’t know I was a journalist.

But if you did define who is and is not a journalist, does that mean some people will get protection under the First Amendment and others wont? That’s idiotic.

By: Matthew Schafer

Matthew Schafer — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:18:24 +0000

The previous SPJ president was against any definition of who a “journalist” is. Indeed, at the time the shield law was being considered in Congress last year, he told me, “Many of us within the coalition of journalism organizations are not content with the definition. In fact, it is a difficult pill to swallow. SPJ has been fighting against a definition of a journalist for four years now and I would prefer it not included.”

This president just wrote, “First and foremost, I don’t believe we should be in the business of defining journalism any more than we want to define who is a journalist.”

I think what Mr. Murphey confuses the issue. The fact that we refuse to define a journalist or journalism allows for the traditional protections granted by the First Amendment to extend into the future. It would be foolish to attempt to define what journalism is, because in a time of such flux, we don’t know what journalism will be tomorrow and do not want to freeze some future iteration of a journalist out of those First Amendment protection. That is why we should avoid pigeonholing it today.

By: Joel

Joel — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:54:23 +0000

Good lord. This blog post only adds to the growing mountain of evidence the professional journalism in the United States is a hollow husk of a once great Fourth Estate. Thanks to JMills and Tom for some worthwhile reading. As for SPJ, you’re welcome to join us in the 21st Century whenever you are ready.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:48:24 +0000

Yeah, um, the role of journalists is not to protect the “security of government.”

But as for the Who’s a Journalist question, what a boring topic to debate. Ninety-nine percent of the argument centers around “real” journalists who don’t want to compete with “new media” journalists.

It’s the “we don’t like change” crowd that permeates nearly every single debate that involves something being different.

But the thing is, new media journalists don’t care what “real” journalists think of them. They’re plowing full-steam ahead and embracing the extremely powerful publishing tools of the 21st century.

What’s the sound of one hand clapping?

So if you’re still debating whether bloggers are journalists, or whether WikiLeaks are journalists, you’re engaging in a form of mental masturbation. What happens if you, or SPJ, decides that WikiLeaks isn’t journalism? Nothing. What happens if you decide bloggers aren’t journalists? Nothing.

Some of the best journalism of the previous centuries was produced by journalists who were not always bastions of ethical fortitude as defined by SPJ.

This is the most exciting time to be a journalist that we will ever experience in our lives, don’t waste it debating nonsense.

By: Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:44:39 +0000

This statement says…

“Those who say ‘no’ call WikiLeaks a source, a conduit, a whistleblower. They call the quarter-million diplomatic cables posted online a data-dump without filters, fact-checking or context from other sources.”

The quarter million cables have not been dumped online. That’s a myth. A month after this was written, about 2,000 have been released. This error has been repeated numerous times by the press. To find it uncorrected here, a week after NPR’s high-profile mea culpa, is a bit of a shock.

See:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/10/wikileaks_media (Dec. 10)

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/28/132416904/how-many-documents-has-wikileaks-published (Dec. 28)

http://lippmannwouldroll.com/2010/12/28/npr-fesses-up-to-wikileaks-coverage-blunder-now-its-everyone-elses-turn/ (Dec. 28)