Why Glenn Greenwald?s new media venture is a big deal By HENRY FARRELL Oct 17 2013 < http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/17/why-glenn-gree...
Glenn Greenwald, who has published many of the most important scoops from the Edward Snowden leaks, is leaving The Guardian and setting up a new media venture with long-time journalist Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill from The Nation. The venture is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has suggested that he?s prepared to invest more than $250 million in the new venture. This is big news for journalism. It?s also big news for people interested in the relationship between information technology and politics. Martha Finnemore and I drafted a paper a couple of years ago about how Wikileaks-type organizations were changing the relationship between knowledge, politics and hypocrisy. Our ideas about hypocrisy led to an article on the true consequences of the Snowden leaks, which is coming out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs. Our ideas about knowledge and politics maybe tell us something about the consequences of the new venture (but bear with me ? our argument is a little complicated). Fundamentally, we think that much of the commentary about Wikileaks and Snowden?s revelations are wrong. Most people think that Wikileaks, Snowden etc. are politically important because they reveal secret information that was hitherto unknown. Many of Wikileaks? defenders, including, initially, Julian Assange himself, thought that the organization would change politics and bring down corrupt regimes by revealing information that the government wanted to hide. The critics of Snowden and Wikileaks actually agree ? they argue that they have hurt America (and perhaps the world) by revealing information that should have stayed secret. Neither are right. Neither Wikileaks or Snowden has revealed any truly surprising anddamaging information. European and South American governments already knew that the U.S. was spying on them. China was certainly aware that U.S. agencies were trying to hack into its systems. On the other hand, Assange?s initial hope that he could change the world through publishing damaging information turned out to be completely unfounded. Wikileaks had a very frustrating time trying to get anyone except bloggers to pay attention to their early revelations. No one seemed to care. The reason why is important. There?s too much information out there for most people to pay attention to, let alone figure out whether they believe it or not. Hence, most people rely on other institutions such as media organizations to tell them which information is worth caring about. Not only do people not pay much attention to information until it gets the stamp of approval from some authoritative institution, but this information is transformed, because everybody knows that everybody else is paying attention to it. It stops being mere information, and becomes knowledge ? generally accepted facts that people use to build their understanding of what everybody knows about politics. Established newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Financial Times play a crucial sociological role in deciding which information is important and trustworthy, and which is not. When one of these newspapers publishes information, it is legitimated as knowledge ? which people are not only more likely to take seriously themselves, but may have to take seriously, because they know that other people are taking it seriously. European Union governments knew perfectly well that the U.S. had been tapping communications in their building (and if you read specialist sources, you knew about this, too). However, these governments found it more politically convenient to ignore U.S. spying than to make a big fuss. When this information became knowledge ? when it was published and treated as authoritative by major newspapers ? it became impossible to ignore any longer. Assange and Wikileaks figured out some version of this early on. This is why they started working together with major newspapers such as the Guardian and New York Times ? because this was the only way that they could get people to systematically pay attention to the information they had uncovered, and to turn that information into knowledge that everyone accepted. Unsurprisingly, however, this relationship turned out to be very difficult. Newspapers ? even the most pioneering ones ? have political relationships with governments, which make them nervous about publishing (and hence validating) certain kinds of information. This also helps explain the awkwardness that many journalists express toward Greenwald. While they recognize that he has uncovered many valuable scoops, they don?t see him as bounded by the same rules as they are. On the one hand, people like Assange, Greenwald and Snowden need newspapers or similar media outlets. Without some such outlet, they are voices in the wilderness. On the other hand, exactly because newspapers play a crucial political role in validating knowledge, they have complicated relationships with governments and politicians. This leads them to actions which people like Assange and Greenwald are likely to see as compromises with power. [snip] via Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org -------------------------------------------------------------- - # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org