WikiLeak’s release of thousands of US State Department diplomatic cables certainly qualifies as printing and raising hell, but one has to wonder if what they’re publishing is really all that newsworthy.
The first two info dumps in July and October 2010, on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars* respectively, were journalistic coups on the order of Woodward/Bernstein crossed with the Pentagon Papers. The amount of data that had been concealed—the secret history, if you will—from the citizenry of the US and the global community was simply staggering.
The diplomatic cables are a letdown after those revelations. More than that, they’re hardly surprising. Anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with world events is well aware of just how obsessed the Chinese government is with Internet censorship; that Putin is the power behind Medvedev’s throne and running awfully close to a dictator; that Berlusconi is the vain, mostly ineffective figurehead of a barely-cohesive coalition government; and that Brazil wants to play the “Everyone’s Best Friend”† game. (Here is an interesting analysis by a couple of NYT writers.) In short, there’s a lot of data but little in the way of news.
What the cables represent are the internal monologues of a massive, often unwieldy bureaucracy with a very complex task. The idea that sentiments similar to those expressed by various ambassadors and diplomatic officers have not been espoused by the State Department’s counterparts is difficult to imagine. To be honest, I consider it more than likely that, upon hearing the WikiLeaks announcement, more than one diplomat or foreign-affairs minister experienced a moment of intense, buttock-clenching terror. Perhaps Lula da Silva put it best: "...It was thought that the Americans were better, but in the end they do the same silliness that the whole world does."†
Every day, we—as individuals, operating in a mind-bogglingly complicated system of social exchange and interaction—tell a hundred little white lies, even if it’s just smiling and saying “no worries” when someone steps on our feet or spills their coffee on us. Our private thoughts and immediate reactions are analyzed, discarded or modified, and then stifled or communicated in a calm, considered manner. This is what lets societies function.
In the office or any collaborative environment, we laud the one who can meld disparate elements, groups and interests into a single, functioning—or at least not self-sabotaging—unit. No matter whether it’s hand-holding the newbie, cajoling the whiner into carrying a fair share of the load, or concealing utter contempt for the pettiness of one or more parties (or all of them), the diplomacy of that person is rightly praised.
All that WikiLeaks accomplished was making those initial, impulsive and, most importantly, private thoughts of the bureaucracy public, in essence airing someone else’s laundry (dirty or not-so-).
If there is in fact egg on the State Department’s face, it’s due to having a database for supposedly confidential cables about as secure as America OnLine circa 1995. One doesn’t keep their innermost thoughts and desires where anyone might come along and have a peek at what might or might not be the author’s true feelings. In that regard, few words suffice to describe just how badly the State Department screwed up. One could argue that this grievous error is the State Department lying in the bed it’s made.
On the other hand, that doesn’t absolve WikiLeaks, nor does it strip the act of the somewhat childish, “Nyah nyah!” quality that seems to characterize it. This latest info dump doesn’t seem to stem from the same journalistic drive to seek truth and report it that defined the Afghan War Diary or the Iraq War Logs, so much as a desire to make the US government look bad. [Full disclosure: Anyone who has read anything I’ve written knows that I don’t think the US government needs any help at all in that regard. But giving a fair shake, and giving credit where due, is an integral part of journalistic ethics and integrity.]
Keeping secrets does not imply nefarious purposes; malice in secrecy comes from the subject matter that’s hidden, not the simple act of hiding.
*Note: WikiLeaks.org's servers are down at the time of publication, so here's Wikipedia's entry.
†Note: Linked page is in Spanish.
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