Sorry I haven’t been able to post. I’ve been on a family reunion over the past weekend, and we had no internet or cell phone reception the entire time. I loved it.
As most of you have probably already heard in the past 48 hours, Wikileaks has released what they call the “Afgan War Diary” to the world. This war diary is a compillation of over 75,000 official military documents detailing everything from encounters with suicide bombers and accounts of multiple insurgent (civilian) deaths. The founder of the site, Julian Assange, spoke in a press conference yesterday afternoon about the controversial site, and explained that he believes that there is evidence of war crimes in the thousands of pages of leaked U.S. military documents. What does the emergence of these documents mean for our military, the safety of our soldiers, and the way news in written?
For much time, the media and the news have been at a push-pull conflict. Should news organizations set their sites on the dedication of producing purely straight news. Leaving out media biases, it is simply near impossible to make anything pure and straight-forward when money is involved. News outlets can only exist, unless they are non-profit, if people are watching them, which is where the funding of advertisers comes into play.WikiLeaks is non-profit and has received tremendous financial support in the past few months according to its founder. “We have raised a million dollars from the general public. As a result we are enabled to have a sort of fierce independence that larger organizations find more difficult. That said, of course, we are also immediately accountable to the public because that is where our money comes from, directly from the public, not from advertisers or foundations,” said Assange. Many local, national, and even world news organizations have been falling short when it comes to telling the public what they need to know in order to be socially responsible citizens that hold their government and eachother accountable for their actions.
We’ve all seen this ridiculous news report:
While we all can’t help but to sit, laugh, and be entertained by this, it is also kind of scary. There are so many issues that have gone unseen and unbeknownced to the public that it is a travesty to waste valuable news space for stories like this.
This one is even better:
