WikiLeaks - a pivotal moment to reshape journalism
“A rare thing – a Dave Winer soliloquy – about the line between people who welcome WikiLeaks and those who fight it. And the distractions.”
Dave’s thoughts on the ongoing WikiLeaks story and how it represents a “reformation of journalism”. He argues that there is a clear divide between those who are willing to use the leaked information and those who are not: Dave is firmly on the side of using the information. He criticizes the New York Times for not being more supportive of WikiLeaks and the First Amendment, and calls out the hypocrisy of companies like Amazon and PayPal for banning WikiLeaks while allowing other news outlets to cover the leaks. Dave believes the leaks could expose important information that the public needs to know, even if it makes some powerful people uncomfortable. Overall, Dave sees the WikiLeaks story as a pivotal moment that will reshape journalism going forward.
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Transcript
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Good morning, it’s Dave Winer
here and it’s Friday, the 31st
of December, 2010, which
is itself a really scary
concept, not the December 31st
part, of course, it always is.
The 2010 part is completely unreal and it’s just the hour and minute hands spin around sort of at the same rate that they always have spun around at , it seems, but the year hand and the decade in now, it ’s like, oh my god, that’s just ridiculous, it’s not already the second decade of what is now not such a new century, anyway, I got a comment the other day, actually I think it was yesterday on Twitter, that a guy said he missed the morning coffee notes and I thought, well, you know, things come and go and then I had something I wanted to say this morning and it needed to be said in voice and I tried to write it, I don’t think anybody would have understood it and so then I thought, well, well, I have the tools, why don ’t I just go ahead and like pretend that this is like the PDF LEAKS conference that, LEAKS conference that we had a few Saturdays ago that was so excellent, it was here in New York, it was a very cold morning or cold day and there were just like a panel, two panels of, I guess it was like eight people each, so a total of maybe 16 to 20 people, all of whom were kind of like, you know, academics and journalists and diplomats, there were some diplomats there and a couple of people, Esther Dyson and Mark Pesci came in over Skype and it was very cool, everybody had eight minutes to talk and everybody had something to say because it was a flash conference, it was one of these things that didn’t happen like six months after an event, you know, on a regular schedule for conferences and so, you know, everybody’s thinking was fresh and the people in the room also had fresh ideas and people were confused and because they were confused and they knew that they were confused, I think their minds were a little more open to listening to other people because that might help to figure out what’s actually going on and that’s the moment you want to have the conference , is when you’re still trying to figure it out, once everybody’s got their positions and that’s kind of what, this is really interesting how this double tails because, so what I really wanted, why I sort of picked up the phone here and decided to phone this one in instead of writing this one down because as these things develop, as the WikiLeaks story develops , it develops subplots and then the subplots threaten to take over the mainstream and of course there are people who know how to manipulate the discussions on a macro level and they do it very well and you never know when, you know, when you see the discussion going down one of these holes, you wonder if it isn’t something that somebody sort of planned out to turn out that way because, you know, these people know how to manipulate other people and they also know how to manipulate people to get what they want. Anyway, so let me pop the stack now and come back to, if my phone’s going to go crazy here, this is an observation that I made many , many years ago when I was still living in California the first time I was still living in California and the, you know, sort of trying to figure out like how conflicts of interest work in journalism because everybody has interests and there’s no way to eliminate them and there’s no reason to want to eliminate them just as long as you know what they are, right? And so one of the things I figured out and I concluded and I came up with a good example of it was the San Jose Mercury News which was the local newspaper in the Bay Area where I lived in the South Bay and I said the San Jose Mercury News is in favor of San Jose. So they’re expected to take the point of view that in any story that San Jose is a good thing and it’s okay for them to have that conflict of interest because that’s just where they’re coming from, you know, and it’s good to have one voice that’s in favor of San Jose and just as equally might be a good idea to have a voice that’s in favor of San Francisco and at the same time have one that’s in favor of Cupertino and Los Gatos and Campbell and Gilroy and Morgan Hill and Mill Piedas and Menlo Park and Palo Alto, Wood side, Los Altos. Isn’t it sad? I can tell you never got that down in that area, Portola Valley and you know you want to have all the interest represented and so it’s no problem having that, you know.
And so then you sort of, then why is this relevant now? It’s very relevant because you have to know to what extent your interests are represented in a given story because that’s going to determine your editorial policy, it’s going to determine how you look at things in your priorities. Whether it ’s the long-term battle between Salon and Wired apparently, there’s a rivalry there that I knew nothing about, but of course it totally makes sense.
I mean Salon and Wired are two brand names that came about roughly in the same time period , Wired a couple of years before Salon and both of them have survived over a series of busts and booms and busts and just over and over kind of expansion , contraction and so forth that have left them probably pretty, you know, raw and irritated in some ways but they should be proud because they’re still standing, you know, they’re still there and a lot of the competitors they had or not, you know, and I know because, you know, I’m of the same world that they are. I come from the same, in fact I wrote for Wired, I should disclaim that, I wrote for Wired for a few years in the 90s and that, you know, I also did a deal with Salon for their blogging software in the late 90s so, and I know people, many people at both publications and while I don’t like everything that they do, in general I’m in favor of Wired and Salon, okay, so let me say that, get that out of the way. But in this story, this WikiLeaks story, which is such an amazing, amazing story because it’s so much more than a story, I mean in a way I think that WikiLeaks may represent the reformation of journalism and in that all the old, what’s all of what’s old in journalism, all of what doesn’t work in journalism will be on one side of the line, okay, imagine this really solid line, I mean, because the line is very solid, I’ll explain what that is in a sec.
You know, everything on one side of the line is the old way and everything on the other side reflects this new reality.
The new reality is that cables leak and they leak sometimes in the hundreds of thousands and what do you do with such a leak? What’s the responsible way to deal with that information? But there’s never a question on the rights, let’s say on one side of the line, on the side that’s decided to use this stuff, never question really about whether to use it, okay, whereas on the other side , that’s all the question is, they’re not going to use this information, they hope because they’re a worst nightmare and it’s on the side of CNN, MS NBC, I don’t know, all of the journalists, CNN seems to be leading this one and that they’ve got like this stick up their ass that says, this is wrong, we can’t use this information. And I watched this interview with Glenn Greenwald, who’s one of my heroes, gotta say it, he may be a putz, you know, that’s what Wired says, Wired says, Glenn Greenwald, what a putz, right, that’s what I hear. Well, so maybe he is, but he’s a fucking hero. I watched him argue with the CNN people and their Bush White House security lady who was lying, I mean, the boldest lies , and he called them on him, you know, so why don’t they want to use this stuff, I don’t know, you know what, I don’t care, but there’s the line. So now, the question is, if you’re on the other side of the line and you’re using it, like, do you know that? And do you act accordingly? So for weeks, the New York Times had not said anything editorially about this , and my fear was they were not going to. In fact, Bill Keller had said some nasty stuff about Julian Assange, about he’s not his kind of journalist and everything, I thought, oh, geez , I mean, he’s got some idea that he can cut himself free of this, Keller, and somehow not be part of this and still be the New York Times.
And that’s just got to be tearing him apart. Let’s give a guy a lot of credit for trying to navigate something that’s complicated, because he’s part of a corporation that’s trying to survive, and at times they think they need to get government help, and they want to be able to knock on that door and not have the government say, well, you were one inch away from going down with Julian Ass ange as Julian Assange is being called off to be executed, right? Bill Keller, that’s got to be on his mind, right? I mean, it would be if I were in issues , but that’s just not the right way to deal with it. And ultimately, and I’m told by people inside the Times that they’ve got this stuff very compartmentalized, and Keller does not write the editorial page and blah, blah, blah, they got the editorial people, and they got the editorial page people, and they got the op-ed people, they got this people, and that, you know what, to me, it’s just the New York Times.
And I’m sorry, I don’t have to know the distinctions that I don’t want to know. And it’s not fair to ask me to know them, okay? I know, because I don’t ask them to know all the compartments of my process and act accordingly. They don’t. They would never. They so have such a superficial knowledge and revel in their superficiality of what I do that, you know, the hell with it. I see it as the New York Times. And the New York Times had not said that the First Amendment applies to the Internet. This goes back to the Communication Decency Act in 1996, and it was just the clearest case. You had the Congress passed a law. The President signed it. And the newspapers, the news organizations, the professional ones, just sat there with their hands full and said nothing. Everybody privately said, “Well, the courts will turn it down. We don’t have to worry about it,” blah, blah, blah.
Well, that’s not good enough, okay? Because it’s just not good enough. If something’s un constitutional and it’s wrong, and you are dependent on that part of the Constitution to do what you do, then you need to stand up and say that it’s wrong, because you can’t make this line. This is the problem with what the Times was doing back then in 1996. In their minds, I mean, I’m just extrapolating.
Why no expression of support for the Internet in the moment of the Communication Decency Act, which was an attack on freedom of speech on the Internet by the legislative and executive branches of the U. S. government ? I think they must have thought somehow that’s not us. You know, we’re over here, and they ’re over there, and there’s something that’s between us that keeps us from being them. We can’t quite find it, but we think it’s there. Well, you know, let’s fast forward now, you know, 14, 15 years later, almost, and I don’t think anybody sees that there’s any distinction between what they do and what we do. The government is holding on to one last fig leaf, and CNN is trying to help them with the fig leaf, and God knows who else is standing up trying to make this pretense that there’s something that separates what happens on the Internet from what happens in journalism . And that’s like saying that, you know, it’s the same old argument. Can you do journalism on a telephone? I mean, it’s a stupid question. Tele phone’s a tool, and of course you do journalism on a telephone.
Telephone is an invaluable tool for the journalist. It’s one that can’t be, you know, you can’t do journalism without a telephone. Well, maybe now you can, because you have the Internet.
But the Internet, there’s no line. You’re not going to find a line between… So, the Times, by the way, did write the editorial. They didn’t go after the tech industry, and I hope they get around to doing that, okay? But they did go after the banking industry, and they said the banking industry is screwing up because the banking industry somehow feels that they can have an opinion about what their customers, you know, people who write checks, can spend their money on. In other words, if I want to give money to WikiLeaks, there’s nothing that says anybody has a right to get in the way of that . In fact, there was a Supreme Court decision recently that seems to turn upside down the political system in the U. S.
And that says it’s an abrog ation of the First Amendment.
Free speech, First Amendment.
So, it’s a violation of the First Amendment, probably a better word than abrogation, a violation of the First Amendment to say that any entity, any person, can’t give as much money as they want to, anonymously, to any political cause that they want to. And for the purposes of this discussion, a corporation is a person, by the way. So, corporations can give money to whoever they want to, but according to Bank of America and PayPal and Mastercard, I can’t give money to WikiLeaks ? I don’t get it. That’s really screwed up. Well, the time said so, and thank you very much. Now, the tech industry gets itself into the same kind of mess when Amazon kicks off WikiLeaks. Again, WikiLeaks has been convicted of nothing.
And there’s a lot of intelligent people, myself included, who say that if you ’re gonna kick off WikiLeaks from S3 and EC2, then my friend, you have to kick off The New York Times and LeMond and El Pai and their Sp iegel. But wait a minute, it’s not just that. You have to kick off The Huffington Post because they’re covering WikiLe aks and they’re running content from those cables. And you have to kick off, oh, I forgot the Guardian, too. Can’t let the Guardian in here because they’re doing it. They’re leaving. They’re the best. They ’re doing the best job here. But even Fox News seems to be getting in on the act here. I think they’re finally waking up over there at Fox News realizing, you know, I bet there’s some good stuff in those cables that we could use for our cause . And I don’t doubt for a second, you know, when I saw that Iran, Iran has cut off access to all news about WikiLe aks to their citizens, I thought, man, getting on the opposite side of that sounds like something that would interest the U. S.
government. I mean, if Iran doesn’t like it, that must be good. Right? Right? So, you know, this is like, this story doesn’t lend itself to these knee-jerk quick, you know . You have to figure out the big picture. The solid line is so beautiful because what the solid line says, you’re either scared of change or you ’re not scared of change. Or that’s not true. Everybody should be scared of change. I mean, change is scary, right? It is.
But what do you, what’s your reaction to that fear? That’s the big thing. Fear is nothing wrong with fear. Fear is good.
Fear is what keeps you alive.
Without fear, you would be dead . Without fear, believe me, you would be dead. There are so many times in your life when you protected yourself. And the reason why, and you needed to, because what you were looking at was dangerous. That without fear, you wouldn’t have protected yourself and it would have hit you and you would have died. So , fear is good. The question is now, use your mind and you say, “Can I avoid this?” Or, " Should I avoid this? Is it really dangerous? It seems dangerous. Is it really dangerous?" There’s the process .
And then you have to sort of suck it in, take a deep breath, and then ask yourself what you want to do. And in this case, I don’t think you get to say, because there are sometimes when you can’t stop things, you just can’t stop it. You have to notice those things too.
You say, “Well, I really would rather this didn’t happen, but I can’t stop it. And therefore, trying to stop it is not a good strategy. " And I think that’s the case of this, is that you can try to stop it, but it isn’t going to stop. You can punish somebody for this and make up all kinds of reasons why you’re doing it, thinking that it’s important to stop it so I don’t care whether , you know, I’m making a lot of sense or not or if people even know it. But it isn’t actually going to stop it. So, and then the question of should you want to stop it, because you don’t know what’s going to come out. And it could be important. It could be something that we need to know that’s going to help the rest of us understand what’s actually happening in the world, because God knows, anybody who’s paying attention is very, very confused and puzzled about what it is that’s happening. And so, maybe, and Ariana Huffington said this to me in a conversation after the PDF link , she gave a great talk, actually didn’t say it to me, she said it’s the room. Who knows what’s in what, it just could be one of those cables could have the piece of information that unravels something that desperately needs to be unraveled, you know , exposes something that we all need to see. Of course, the people who would be seen by that wouldn’t want to be seen. But maybe we do need to see it, you know. There certainly have been examples in my lifetime of things that people desperately didn’t want us to see that we needed to see. Like , for example, we needed to see that the 1972 presidential election was probably stolen, that the Republican Party steered the Democratic primary process so that the weakest candidate, the one that they most wanted to face, would be the one that was nominated.
I know it’s not fair to George McGovern to say that, but it’s what it ended up looking like. And what certainly came up was that they played these dirty tricks on the Democrats and they were all very illegal and they were all highly unfair to, you know, the presumption is that basically our political process is fair, that the people do get to make the choice. But when it’s so poll uted, we needed to know that. We needed to know that our system had gotten that sick, that it needed some kind of remed iation here, some kind of fix.
And, you know, God knows there ’s a lot of that kind of stuff that must be going on now that we’re not seeing it. And we need to see it. That’s what, that’s where, I mean, I’m on that, totally on that side of the line. Let’s see it. Come on. I mean, we have these great systems for disseminating information now. Let’s use them. Let’s use the intellect of the people. We ’ve got these amazing communication tools now that we didn’t used to have. Let’s use them. And let’s find out what’s actually going on. And now that the door is 90% open, let’s open it the rest of the way. And let’s put our foot in the door, all of our feet in the door and make sure that damn door stays open. Okay. So now, don’t the problems of salon and wired seem really irrelevant? Because here’s the conclusion. Okay.
Just as the San Jose Mercury News has a reason to want to see San Jose do well. Okay. I mean, if you accept that, then salon and wired have a very strong reason to see the internet and specifically free speech on the internet do well. That’s what they have in common. They ’re both only on the internet. I mean, I’m talking about wired. com. A wired magazine does publish a print publication. Give me a break.
Do you think wired exists without the internet? Go take another look.
It does not exist without the internet. It requires it.
In fact, I mean, well, to say that any publication exists without the internet now is also ridiculous. There’s no such thing as publishing without the internet in 2011. Okay. But these two publications are of the internet. That’s where they come from. This is where they this is the legacy that they share.
And this is why it is so amazingly crazy that they let the egos get in a way of actually protecting the thing that they need the most to continue to exist. This is like being at the Cuban Missile Crisis and not wanting to sit at the table with Bob McNamara and Dean Rusk don’t like each other .
So they’re not going to sit down and meet with the president to talk about, you know, whether or not we should blow up Cuba and risk World War III, right? Because it really was pretty bad, right? This is really pretty bad. Go the wrong way here with the wrong information and Julian Assange is, you know , arrested and tried. And Ass ange decides no more playing Mr. Nice Guy. Now I’m really going to do some damage. This is what they were worried about .
And now the government reacts by completely shutting down the internet. So maybe we just maybe if there’s proof that he ’s innocent of any of the stuff that anybody has been saying about him, then maybe that needs to just clearly come out, okay? And maybe these stupid little personal issues.
That’s because that’s what it looks like to me. I have no idea what the issues are.
However, I have been involved in communities that melted down on things like this. And being in the middle of it, you know, that there’s just got to be some way to dig out. You know, and eventually you do.
Eventually the emotions settle down.
But my point is, come on guys, let’s just get the information that’s needed to be gotten and remember what’s important.
And just, I guess that’s the moral of the story. I don’t want, whatever, I want to tell a story. And you got yourself a morning coffee notes because that’s what this is, I guess, the morning coffee notes. Kind of a little bit of a throwback.
I don’t think it’ll appear on morningcoffee notes. com because I don’t even think I have a way of putting it there. But I think that’s the end of my story. Shut up some music que ued up. We’re going to do, by the way, if you do like my podcasts , then please do tune in to rebootnews. com. It’s a weekly podcast that I do at NYU with my buddy Jay Rosen. And we talk about all kinds of stuff like this. And we’re friends, so you can hear that. And what we do, it’s a very sort of collegial thing. And we have a real good time. So, and I think the people who listen to it do too. So, anyway, I guess that’s it. Have a great new year, everybody.
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The 2010 part is completely unreal and it’s just the hour and minute hands spin around sort of at the same rate that they always have spun around at , it seems, but the year hand and the decade in now, it ’s like, oh my god, that’s just ridiculous, it’s not already the second decade of what is now not such a new century, anyway, I got a comment the other day, actually I think it was yesterday on Twitter, that a guy said he missed the morning coffee notes and I thought, well, you know, things come and go and then I had something I wanted to say this morning and it needed to be said in voice and I tried to write it, I don’t think anybody would have understood it and so then I thought, well, well, I have the tools, why don ’t I just go ahead and like pretend that this is like the PDF LEAKS conference that, LEAKS conference that we had a few Saturdays ago that was so excellent, it was here in New York, it was a very cold morning or cold day and there were just like a panel, two panels of, I guess it was like eight people each, so a total of maybe 16 to 20 people, all of whom were kind of like, you know, academics and journalists and diplomats, there were some diplomats there and a couple of people, Esther Dyson and Mark Pesci came in over Skype and it was very cool, everybody had eight minutes to talk and everybody had something to say because it was a flash conference, it was one of these things that didn’t happen like six months after an event, you know, on a regular schedule for conferences and so, you know, everybody’s thinking was fresh and the people in the room also had fresh ideas and people were confused and because they were confused and they knew that they were confused, I think their minds were a little more open to listening to other people because that might help to figure out what’s actually going on and that’s the moment you want to have the conference , is when you’re still trying to figure it out, once everybody’s got their positions and that’s kind of what, this is really interesting how this double tails because, so what I really wanted, why I sort of picked up the phone here and decided to phone this one in instead of writing this one down because as these things develop, as the WikiLeaks story develops , it develops subplots and then the subplots threaten to take over the mainstream and of course there are people who know how to manipulate the discussions on a macro level and they do it very well and you never know when, you know, when you see the discussion going down one of these holes, you wonder if it isn’t something that somebody sort of planned out to turn out that way because, you know, these people know how to manipulate other people and they also know how to manipulate people to get what they want. Anyway, so let me pop the stack now and come back to, if my phone’s going to go crazy here, this is an observation that I made many , many years ago when I was still living in California the first time I was still living in California and the, you know, sort of trying to figure out like how conflicts of interest work in journalism because everybody has interests and there’s no way to eliminate them and there’s no reason to want to eliminate them just as long as you know what they are, right? And so one of the things I figured out and I concluded and I came up with a good example of it was the San Jose Mercury News which was the local newspaper in the Bay Area where I lived in the South Bay and I said the San Jose Mercury News is in favor of San Jose. So they’re expected to take the point of view that in any story that San Jose is a good thing and it’s okay for them to have that conflict of interest because that’s just where they’re coming from, you know, and it’s good to have one voice that’s in favor of San Jose and just as equally might be a good idea to have a voice that’s in favor of San Francisco and at the same time have one that’s in favor of Cupertino and Los Gatos and Campbell and Gilroy and Morgan Hill and Mill Piedas and Menlo Park and Palo Alto, Wood side, Los Altos. Isn’t it sad? I can tell you never got that down in that area, Portola Valley and you know you want to have all the interest represented and so it’s no problem having that, you know.
And so then you sort of, then why is this relevant now? It’s very relevant because you have to know to what extent your interests are represented in a given story because that’s going to determine your editorial policy, it’s going to determine how you look at things in your priorities. Whether it ’s the long-term battle between Salon and Wired apparently, there’s a rivalry there that I knew nothing about, but of course it totally makes sense.
I mean Salon and Wired are two brand names that came about roughly in the same time period , Wired a couple of years before Salon and both of them have survived over a series of busts and booms and busts and just over and over kind of expansion , contraction and so forth that have left them probably pretty, you know, raw and irritated in some ways but they should be proud because they’re still standing, you know, they’re still there and a lot of the competitors they had or not, you know, and I know because, you know, I’m of the same world that they are. I come from the same, in fact I wrote for Wired, I should disclaim that, I wrote for Wired for a few years in the 90s and that, you know, I also did a deal with Salon for their blogging software in the late 90s so, and I know people, many people at both publications and while I don’t like everything that they do, in general I’m in favor of Wired and Salon, okay, so let me say that, get that out of the way. But in this story, this WikiLeaks story, which is such an amazing, amazing story because it’s so much more than a story, I mean in a way I think that WikiLeaks may represent the reformation of journalism and in that all the old, what’s all of what’s old in journalism, all of what doesn’t work in journalism will be on one side of the line, okay, imagine this really solid line, I mean, because the line is very solid, I’ll explain what that is in a sec.
You know, everything on one side of the line is the old way and everything on the other side reflects this new reality.
The new reality is that cables leak and they leak sometimes in the hundreds of thousands and what do you do with such a leak? What’s the responsible way to deal with that information? But there’s never a question on the rights, let’s say on one side of the line, on the side that’s decided to use this stuff, never question really about whether to use it, okay, whereas on the other side , that’s all the question is, they’re not going to use this information, they hope because they’re a worst nightmare and it’s on the side of CNN, MS NBC, I don’t know, all of the journalists, CNN seems to be leading this one and that they’ve got like this stick up their ass that says, this is wrong, we can’t use this information. And I watched this interview with Glenn Greenwald, who’s one of my heroes, gotta say it, he may be a putz, you know, that’s what Wired says, Wired says, Glenn Greenwald, what a putz, right, that’s what I hear. Well, so maybe he is, but he’s a fucking hero. I watched him argue with the CNN people and their Bush White House security lady who was lying, I mean, the boldest lies , and he called them on him, you know, so why don’t they want to use this stuff, I don’t know, you know what, I don’t care, but there’s the line. So now, the question is, if you’re on the other side of the line and you’re using it, like, do you know that? And do you act accordingly? So for weeks, the New York Times had not said anything editorially about this , and my fear was they were not going to. In fact, Bill Keller had said some nasty stuff about Julian Assange, about he’s not his kind of journalist and everything, I thought, oh, geez , I mean, he’s got some idea that he can cut himself free of this, Keller, and somehow not be part of this and still be the New York Times.
And that’s just got to be tearing him apart. Let’s give a guy a lot of credit for trying to navigate something that’s complicated, because he’s part of a corporation that’s trying to survive, and at times they think they need to get government help, and they want to be able to knock on that door and not have the government say, well, you were one inch away from going down with Julian Ass ange as Julian Assange is being called off to be executed, right? Bill Keller, that’s got to be on his mind, right? I mean, it would be if I were in issues , but that’s just not the right way to deal with it. And ultimately, and I’m told by people inside the Times that they’ve got this stuff very compartmentalized, and Keller does not write the editorial page and blah, blah, blah, they got the editorial people, and they got the editorial page people, and they got the op-ed people, they got this people, and that, you know what, to me, it’s just the New York Times.
And I’m sorry, I don’t have to know the distinctions that I don’t want to know. And it’s not fair to ask me to know them, okay? I know, because I don’t ask them to know all the compartments of my process and act accordingly. They don’t. They would never. They so have such a superficial knowledge and revel in their superficiality of what I do that, you know, the hell with it. I see it as the New York Times. And the New York Times had not said that the First Amendment applies to the Internet. This goes back to the Communication Decency Act in 1996, and it was just the clearest case. You had the Congress passed a law. The President signed it. And the newspapers, the news organizations, the professional ones, just sat there with their hands full and said nothing. Everybody privately said, “Well, the courts will turn it down. We don’t have to worry about it,” blah, blah, blah.
Well, that’s not good enough, okay? Because it’s just not good enough. If something’s un constitutional and it’s wrong, and you are dependent on that part of the Constitution to do what you do, then you need to stand up and say that it’s wrong, because you can’t make this line. This is the problem with what the Times was doing back then in 1996. In their minds, I mean, I’m just extrapolating.
Why no expression of support for the Internet in the moment of the Communication Decency Act, which was an attack on freedom of speech on the Internet by the legislative and executive branches of the U. S. government ? I think they must have thought somehow that’s not us. You know, we’re over here, and they ’re over there, and there’s something that’s between us that keeps us from being them. We can’t quite find it, but we think it’s there. Well, you know, let’s fast forward now, you know, 14, 15 years later, almost, and I don’t think anybody sees that there’s any distinction between what they do and what we do. The government is holding on to one last fig leaf, and CNN is trying to help them with the fig leaf, and God knows who else is standing up trying to make this pretense that there’s something that separates what happens on the Internet from what happens in journalism . And that’s like saying that, you know, it’s the same old argument. Can you do journalism on a telephone? I mean, it’s a stupid question. Tele phone’s a tool, and of course you do journalism on a telephone.
Telephone is an invaluable tool for the journalist. It’s one that can’t be, you know, you can’t do journalism without a telephone. Well, maybe now you can, because you have the Internet.
But the Internet, there’s no line. You’re not going to find a line between… So, the Times, by the way, did write the editorial. They didn’t go after the tech industry, and I hope they get around to doing that, okay? But they did go after the banking industry, and they said the banking industry is screwing up because the banking industry somehow feels that they can have an opinion about what their customers, you know, people who write checks, can spend their money on. In other words, if I want to give money to WikiLeaks, there’s nothing that says anybody has a right to get in the way of that . In fact, there was a Supreme Court decision recently that seems to turn upside down the political system in the U. S.
And that says it’s an abrog ation of the First Amendment.
Free speech, First Amendment.
So, it’s a violation of the First Amendment, probably a better word than abrogation, a violation of the First Amendment to say that any entity, any person, can’t give as much money as they want to, anonymously, to any political cause that they want to. And for the purposes of this discussion, a corporation is a person, by the way. So, corporations can give money to whoever they want to, but according to Bank of America and PayPal and Mastercard, I can’t give money to WikiLeaks ? I don’t get it. That’s really screwed up. Well, the time said so, and thank you very much. Now, the tech industry gets itself into the same kind of mess when Amazon kicks off WikiLeaks. Again, WikiLeaks has been convicted of nothing.
And there’s a lot of intelligent people, myself included, who say that if you ’re gonna kick off WikiLeaks from S3 and EC2, then my friend, you have to kick off The New York Times and LeMond and El Pai and their Sp iegel. But wait a minute, it’s not just that. You have to kick off The Huffington Post because they’re covering WikiLe aks and they’re running content from those cables. And you have to kick off, oh, I forgot the Guardian, too. Can’t let the Guardian in here because they’re doing it. They’re leaving. They’re the best. They ’re doing the best job here. But even Fox News seems to be getting in on the act here. I think they’re finally waking up over there at Fox News realizing, you know, I bet there’s some good stuff in those cables that we could use for our cause . And I don’t doubt for a second, you know, when I saw that Iran, Iran has cut off access to all news about WikiLe aks to their citizens, I thought, man, getting on the opposite side of that sounds like something that would interest the U. S.
government. I mean, if Iran doesn’t like it, that must be good. Right? Right? So, you know, this is like, this story doesn’t lend itself to these knee-jerk quick, you know . You have to figure out the big picture. The solid line is so beautiful because what the solid line says, you’re either scared of change or you ’re not scared of change. Or that’s not true. Everybody should be scared of change. I mean, change is scary, right? It is.
But what do you, what’s your reaction to that fear? That’s the big thing. Fear is nothing wrong with fear. Fear is good.
Fear is what keeps you alive.
Without fear, you would be dead . Without fear, believe me, you would be dead. There are so many times in your life when you protected yourself. And the reason why, and you needed to, because what you were looking at was dangerous. That without fear, you wouldn’t have protected yourself and it would have hit you and you would have died. So , fear is good. The question is now, use your mind and you say, “Can I avoid this?” Or, " Should I avoid this? Is it really dangerous? It seems dangerous. Is it really dangerous?" There’s the process .
And then you have to sort of suck it in, take a deep breath, and then ask yourself what you want to do. And in this case, I don’t think you get to say, because there are sometimes when you can’t stop things, you just can’t stop it. You have to notice those things too.
You say, “Well, I really would rather this didn’t happen, but I can’t stop it. And therefore, trying to stop it is not a good strategy. " And I think that’s the case of this, is that you can try to stop it, but it isn’t going to stop. You can punish somebody for this and make up all kinds of reasons why you’re doing it, thinking that it’s important to stop it so I don’t care whether , you know, I’m making a lot of sense or not or if people even know it. But it isn’t actually going to stop it. So, and then the question of should you want to stop it, because you don’t know what’s going to come out. And it could be important. It could be something that we need to know that’s going to help the rest of us understand what’s actually happening in the world, because God knows, anybody who’s paying attention is very, very confused and puzzled about what it is that’s happening. And so, maybe, and Ariana Huffington said this to me in a conversation after the PDF link , she gave a great talk, actually didn’t say it to me, she said it’s the room. Who knows what’s in what, it just could be one of those cables could have the piece of information that unravels something that desperately needs to be unraveled, you know , exposes something that we all need to see. Of course, the people who would be seen by that wouldn’t want to be seen. But maybe we do need to see it, you know. There certainly have been examples in my lifetime of things that people desperately didn’t want us to see that we needed to see. Like , for example, we needed to see that the 1972 presidential election was probably stolen, that the Republican Party steered the Democratic primary process so that the weakest candidate, the one that they most wanted to face, would be the one that was nominated.
I know it’s not fair to George McGovern to say that, but it’s what it ended up looking like. And what certainly came up was that they played these dirty tricks on the Democrats and they were all very illegal and they were all highly unfair to, you know, the presumption is that basically our political process is fair, that the people do get to make the choice. But when it’s so poll uted, we needed to know that. We needed to know that our system had gotten that sick, that it needed some kind of remed iation here, some kind of fix.
And, you know, God knows there ’s a lot of that kind of stuff that must be going on now that we’re not seeing it. And we need to see it. That’s what, that’s where, I mean, I’m on that, totally on that side of the line. Let’s see it. Come on. I mean, we have these great systems for disseminating information now. Let’s use them. Let’s use the intellect of the people. We ’ve got these amazing communication tools now that we didn’t used to have. Let’s use them. And let’s find out what’s actually going on. And now that the door is 90% open, let’s open it the rest of the way. And let’s put our foot in the door, all of our feet in the door and make sure that damn door stays open. Okay. So now, don’t the problems of salon and wired seem really irrelevant? Because here’s the conclusion. Okay.
Just as the San Jose Mercury News has a reason to want to see San Jose do well. Okay. I mean, if you accept that, then salon and wired have a very strong reason to see the internet and specifically free speech on the internet do well. That’s what they have in common. They ’re both only on the internet. I mean, I’m talking about wired. com. A wired magazine does publish a print publication. Give me a break.
Do you think wired exists without the internet? Go take another look.
It does not exist without the internet. It requires it.
In fact, I mean, well, to say that any publication exists without the internet now is also ridiculous. There’s no such thing as publishing without the internet in 2011. Okay. But these two publications are of the internet. That’s where they come from. This is where they this is the legacy that they share.
And this is why it is so amazingly crazy that they let the egos get in a way of actually protecting the thing that they need the most to continue to exist. This is like being at the Cuban Missile Crisis and not wanting to sit at the table with Bob McNamara and Dean Rusk don’t like each other .
So they’re not going to sit down and meet with the president to talk about, you know, whether or not we should blow up Cuba and risk World War III, right? Because it really was pretty bad, right? This is really pretty bad. Go the wrong way here with the wrong information and Julian Assange is, you know , arrested and tried. And Ass ange decides no more playing Mr. Nice Guy. Now I’m really going to do some damage. This is what they were worried about .
And now the government reacts by completely shutting down the internet. So maybe we just maybe if there’s proof that he ’s innocent of any of the stuff that anybody has been saying about him, then maybe that needs to just clearly come out, okay? And maybe these stupid little personal issues.
That’s because that’s what it looks like to me. I have no idea what the issues are.
However, I have been involved in communities that melted down on things like this. And being in the middle of it, you know, that there’s just got to be some way to dig out. You know, and eventually you do.
Eventually the emotions settle down.
But my point is, come on guys, let’s just get the information that’s needed to be gotten and remember what’s important.
And just, I guess that’s the moral of the story. I don’t want, whatever, I want to tell a story. And you got yourself a morning coffee notes because that’s what this is, I guess, the morning coffee notes. Kind of a little bit of a throwback.
I don’t think it’ll appear on morningcoffee notes. com because I don’t even think I have a way of putting it there. But I think that’s the end of my story. Shut up some music que ued up. We’re going to do, by the way, if you do like my podcasts , then please do tune in to rebootnews. com. It’s a weekly podcast that I do at NYU with my buddy Jay Rosen. And we talk about all kinds of stuff like this. And we’re friends, so you can hear that. And what we do, it’s a very sort of collegial thing. And we have a real good time. So, and I think the people who listen to it do too. So, anyway, I guess that’s it. Have a great new year, everybody.
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