The Wikileaks Incident: How Social Media has Changed Warfare Coverage - HuffPo

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:

to me anyway.

Just trying to stay in the Mod's good graces.

:evilgrin:

:hi:

:thumbsup:

but I don't want to rely on the fractured and arbitrary "social media" --which will be the next damned thing the RW fascists will manage to co-opt and systematically destroy, the way they've destroyed every other democratic safety net and would-be impediment to their lies in their path so far- I don't want to have to count on that to restore sanity and the rule of law to this country.

It hasn't worked. Election thieves and war criminals remain free after YEARS of "social media" outcry.

Mayberry Machiavellans go on book release tours and start new 527's to raise real money in the real world to steal the NEXT election and laugh at us.

I want to see mega media busted up. I want to see publicly financed free elections. I want to see the war funding cut off. Every single one of those things requires more than one or two Congress members who give a crap.

And one thing they don't give crap about for sure is this latest wiki-leak and our outrage in the left side of the "social media". It has become more and more apparent every day that none of them- NONE but a few work for us. They ALL work for Fox and CNN. And well, Wall Street.

edit to add-- sorry for the rant, but I am just so disgusted today :-(