Image via Wikipedia
My tweets didn’t get much rise, but I still was shocked at some of the language used in NPR’s Saturday story about whether Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, practices “journalism.”
“I’ve shied away from the term ‘whistle-blower’ because that has a kind of, you know, halo around the term,” says New York Times
Executive Editor Bill Keller. “But they are an advocacy organization.
They have a point of view, and an ideology and they have a modus
operandi, which consists of getting information wherever they can, and
making it public.”
Keller might have been Nixon forty years ago, surely the analogy occured to him. Daniel Ellsberg even made the wires making the connection, it was so handy it became the week’s cliche: this is Afghanistan’s Pentagon Papers. But Keller considers Wikileaks beneath contempt, a mere “source.” Here was the old vs. the new media sharply drawn by the loser catching reflected heat off the newcomer.
