In a digital age, the business of working out what’s true and what’s not (aka journalism) can surely be a more transparent business than it once was, right? That helps encourage people to trust what they seeing, hearing, reading.
But investigative journalism can often require an uncomfortable degree of opacity and even secrecy in order to bring off a real armour-piercing story. Awkward, that. The outfit that takes this to the extreme is Wikileaks, which combines an reconstructed faith in disclosure of any kind, no matter the cost, with a consistent refusal to reveal anything much about its people and methods.
The net result leaves me queasy and I feel no better after reading this fine takeout by Chris McGreal.
Tags: Wikileaks
