Craft of Journalism, why Wikileaks is winning – adapting to a new era

From Al Jazeera – “Inside Story, with presenter Dareen Abu Ghaida, discusses with Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, Wael Abbas, a journalist and blogger, and Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist”.

Sir Robert Fisk, says it best. While not entirely supportive of the brute force manner in which Wikileaks delivers information he acknowledges the media have been asleep on the job for much too long. He refers to Hillary Clinton as “La Clinton”.

Fisk, like so many others, remarks how the information obtained from the cables is relatively unremarkable. This is important because I personally believe, that while the US government may be the forward face of the persecution of Wikileaks, the banksters, fearful of the ‘poison pill’, are actually pulling the strings.

One point each of the speakers seemed to miss is the deliberate role Wikileaks plays as an intermediary, to protect the source, vet the information and unfortunately for the standard media, feed out the data bit by bit.

There is a unanimous agreement that the world is hungry for information, real information, not watered down sound bites.

State of Journalism

As the website continues to release more controversial cables and fights to remain online, many now wonder if WikiLeaks is ushering in a new era of media. That might not be a journalistic entity in itself, but a kind of investigative tool used by traditional media outlets.

Never before has a private organisation provided multiple mainstream media with access to unprecedented classified government information. This new strategy marks a shift not just for WikiLeaks but for whistleblowing in general.

It hints that modern information technology is shifting news leaks away from traditional media such as newspapers.

So, is this a new way of desseminating information? How serious is the threat by WikiLeaks to other media outlets? And how is WikiLeaks shaping the media industry?

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