Bill Keller on WikiLeaks
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times:
Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.
In Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled, Keller describes the newspaper’s experiences with WikiLeaks, its founder, Julian Assange, and the mountain of documents reporters spent months sorting through.
The story is adapted from Keller’s e-book, Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times. Presumably, it will be the cover story of this Sunday’s magazine.
There is a lot to chew on here, from The Times’ efforts to secure the documents on encrypted websites to reporters speaking in code via Skype. (They would refer to Assange as “the source” and the latest data drop as “the package.”)
Keller also defends his newspaper’s decisions toward the WikiLeaks stories, and he describes how news influences our understanding of the world:
Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders.
