The Wikileaks Incident: How Social Media has Changed Warfare Coverage - HuffPo [View All]

The Wikileaks Incident: How Social Media has Changed Warfare Coverage
Phil Bronstein - Executive Vice President and Editor-at-Large, San Francisco Chronicle
Posted: April 6, 2010 08:27 PM

<snip>

Who do you believe, me or your own eyes? It depends.

I ran back to my hotel room, the smell of blood, fear and rebellion still fresh in my head. Somewhere hovering over me was a deadline for the newspaper and a vague sense that some competitors were also writing their own versions of what had happened throughout that long day and night. History, I was sure, held its breath and waited, relying on our telling of it.



It was 1986, in the Philippines. I plugged in my brick of an Epson portable computer, flipped up the screen with its three-line display and made sure my sofa-sized modem was handy. Photographer Kim Komenich had his set-up for picture transmission that involved a rotating drum with sensors, like an old phonograph, just a lot slower. Phone lines sucked.

We could only know for sure what we had seen out there, which anyone in San Francisco with a quarter would know in about another 18 hours. My notebook and Kim's camera were the instruments of recorded fact.

Today, a non-traditional news web site, WikiLeaks, which has its own mystery and secretiveness, apparently cracked a US government encryption code (so, how good can those codes be?) and released stunning and revealing classified helicopter gunship footage they'd cadged from a source.

Within moments, the world exploded in furious debate over 38 minutes worth of hard-eyed Baghdad gunfire and death back in 2007.

A full pinball meltdown among opinionators everywhere spun out flaming outrage and rampant, self-assured positions on an Apache chopper crew's shooting of a dozen people in the street. From blogs: "Iraq Slaughter..Not An Exception, The Rule." On the other side: "Killed Photographer Was Hanging With Insurgents." And those were the calm ones.

The old, venerable media outlet, Reuters, which had two employees among the dead, could not get squat out of government officials the last three years, despite pressure and a Freedom of Information Act request. So much for the power of MSM. Thank you shadowy world of WikiLeaks -- unless you're one of those who thinks the organization is a national security threat...

<snip>

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-bronstein/the-wikileaks-incident-ho_b_527788.html

:shrug: