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WikiLeaks has skewered the news divisions of the American broadcast networks on the horns of a dilemma. How to cover yet another data dump of state secrets by transnational, stateless, hackers--secrets that their own government swears are damaging to national security? Should they be true to their journalistic roots and celebrate the transparency about the workings of the State Department that the diplomatic cables offer? Or should they be true to their nationality, valuing the security that diplomatic secrets are designed to protect over the anarchism of indiscriminate leaking?

The gradual bit-by-bit publication of this massive dump of diplomatic secrets--some 250,000 classified messages in all--has certainly been newsworthy. Over the past nine weekdays, a total of 81 minutes of coverage has appeared on the three nightly newscasts, with NBC (35 min v ABC 23, CBS 22) taking the lead. WikiLeaks has been Story of the Day on three occasions (Monday and Tuesday of last week and Monday of this week), the lead item on NBC three times, ABC twice and CBS once.

Yet unlike the previous release by WikiLeaks in July, when 92,000 secret logs from the Pentagon were released, all concerning the Afghanistan War, there is no single already-existing news story that these latest secrets informed. In July, correspondents could mine the WikiLeaks data for insight into how to cover the military strategy, the diplomatic jockeying and the political popularity of the war in Afghanistan. The war was a focused story and the Pentagon's secrets improved the quality of reporting on it.

Sure enough, this time, there were individual story threads that were gleaned from the document dump, first by newspaper reporters who were given insider access to the secrets by WikiLeaks, then by the networks and other news organizations, which covered those tidbits as they entered the public domain. However, there has been no single coherent story revealed from this mass of data. That is why WikiLeaks itself--its propriety and its legality--became the story. As Tyndall Report discussed last July, the media angle was a sideshow during the Afghanistan dump; this time it has become the central story.

The American networks found themselves on the horns of that dilemma between their commitment to transparency and their loyalty to their nation. Their response was conflicted and incoherent--until they glimpsed a lifeline. They could avoid making those difficult decisions altogether if they could turn the story into a celebrity manhunt instead, for Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' figurehead.

Andrew Tyndall 12/10/10 2:12:28 am

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