Extreme Transparency

David Kushner profiles WikiLeaks. Kushner writes that since launching  "in December, 2006, WikiLeaks has posted more than 1.2 million documents totaling more than 10 million pages":

WikiLeaks' stance that all leaks are good leaks and its disregard for the established protocols for verifying them...alarms some journalists. The site suffers from "a distorted sense of transparency," according to Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "They're giving you everything they've got, but when journalists go through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it well, they determine that source has good information and that the source is somehow deserving of confidentiality." Lucy Dalgish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, thinks WikiLeaks' approach gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from using the site as a source.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan