I'll admit, I haven't been keeping up with WikiLeaks news as much as I should have. A, because there's so much else going on - as I said in my last post, last week was a massive week for news, and a lot of the stories that were blowing up then are still going on now. But also because the volume is so daunting. Hundreds of thousands of cables, endless permutations of secrets. It's all a lot to take in.
I guess the little lazy news consumer that lives inside of me was hoping that there'd be one huge thing, one Manchurian Candidate-sized story. I figured when that happened I'd pay attention.
So tonight, when I saw my headline, I realized I was being played.
On first glance, that looks like what is quickly becoming a pretty standard WikiLeaks story, no? You've got your Deepwater Horizon-level blowout in a country you've never heard of. You've got, in a complete reversal of everything you'd expect, the crown prince of Thailand going to Europe for sex. You've got Chevron trying to develop a transborder Iran-Iraq oil field.
Quite long, lot of detail, links to source docs, comment from BP, only a few little typesetting errors. Actually, it's a pretty decent piece of reporting. So why did this one in particular set off my spider senses?
The hint is right there in the headline.
Do you guys remember the BP oil spill? Of course you do, but I mean, do you remember how insanely huge a news deal it was? Eventually I had to stop listening to NPR until the damn thing was plugged. I was job hunting while it was going on, and the AP, the NYT, CNN, everyone was trying to hire someone to go down to New Orleans and cover it. Seeing more than a dozen reporter jobs a month is rare these days. I probably saw twenty in the first two weeks of the spill.
Every shrimp boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico was interviewed at least once. Rachel Maddow put on her best dyke-about-town getup and trudged through the swamp in a four hundred dollar hoodie and Chucks. Drill Baby Drill died overnight. It was easily Manchurian Candidate big, as far as stories go.
And now there was another one, and the story showed up in my Google Reader from the Guardian at 1 in the morning. I don't even think the Times has covered it yet. If it gets a bullet on CNN I'll eat my face.
There wasn't a Manchurian Candidate big story here. There were TWO. Iranian-Iraqi oil field?! Seriously?! And I can't help imagining the Thai king one will seem that size to people in Thailand. That's three massive stories that I would completely, totally, definitely have erased from my Google feed unread had something not connected in my brain.
How many more?
How many WikiLeaks stories can you name? Oh sure, you know all about Julian Assange. You know about the DDOS attacks, the bail hearings, the Swedish broken condom extradition, the OKCupid profile. You know about the Espionage Act, the Free Bradley Manning rallies at Quantico.
You know the human side. Because that's how these stories are being reported; as sidebars to celebrity gossip.
To a certain extent, that is natural. Assange is a publicity hound whose aim is to star in his own moral fable, and he's doing a pretty good job so far. If not for WikiLeaks, he'd probably be one of those guys in their mid-40s who hangs out at the local undergraduate coffee co-op, hiding behind a Chomsky biography and preying on freshmen girls who grow out their armpit hair to show daddy how much they hate him. He's a creeper, he's a douchebag, he's a saint, he's a vigilante, he's a hero, he's a terrorist - he's a KEYWORD.
Would you let this man date your roommate?
There's a saying in Internet age journalism that the perfect headline would be something like "Lady Gaga teams up with Justin Bieber, cast of 'Glee' to launch artisan cupcake store." Actually, the perfect headline would be even more keyword-dense - it would cram as many search terms into as little space as possible. 'Assange,' 'Cablegate,' 'WikiLeaks' - they all make pretty good Twitter trending topics.
Besides, it's not like WikiLeaks has a lot of competition for their title as 'Most SEO-Friendly Whistleblowers.' There used to be lone wolfs like this everywhere - I had a professor who cut his teeth during the halcyon days of disgrunted ex-CIA grunts in the 1970s and he'd tell us stories of swimming in classified documents. But today there's much more net-savvy among government organizations, more red tape, and fewer journalists who are paid less, asked to do more and often unsupported by newsrooms and other professional environments. News organizations have so many economic existential threats that no one is particularly eager to add legal ones by pissing off the wrong people. It's a great time to be the Manchurian Candidate.
But lo, here was a source of good stories who wasn't bad looking and liked to say douchey, headline-worthy things! It's like if Justin Bieber showed up with a battered manila envelope in the dead of night. Now news orgs could do well by doing good - publish the important stories without driving casual news consumers away from boring facts and into the doughy embrace of Perez Hilton.
It's as if, being afraid people would be too alienated by the technicalities of federal coverups and missing tape recordings, newspapers decided that Watergate was really a story about Deep Throat.
Of course, maybe (read: probably) I'm being paranoid. Maybe this is just the result of years of study of how people gravitate to stories, and maybe it's going to end up bringing more people to these stories which would otherwise have been lost in the white noise. But I wonder. The NYT has tremendous power to set the dynamics of coverage for this type of story; the NYT consulted with the government before running cable stories; and the NYT is as guilty of keeping the source as the lede as anyone else here. I wonder if someone the NYT talked to suggested that it would be better if people got the sense that WikiLeaks was really the story here, because they knew.
They knew that the contents of any one, and probably many, of these cables could, in and of themselves, be the stuff of a multi-installment head-rolling expose. They knew that a constant barrage of stories that were actually about fraud, crime, abuse of power, intimidation, and blackmail would be infinitely worse for the people in power. They knew that, however explosive the content under the lede is, as long as the lede stays firmly fixed on Assange and WikiLeaks a lot of readers, casual and professional alike, are going to empty their Google feeds without looking too closely. And they knew that sooner or later, people would get bored of the stories and the news would have to move on, running like hell after the next hot keyword.
They knew that, eventually, everyone gets over Bieber fever.
No comments:
Post a Comment