Last night I attended a panel event for my journalism class at Columbia Journalism School entitled, "Life after WikiLeaks: Who won the information war?" The panelists were: Mark Stephens, British lawyer, well known defender of free expression and Julian Assange's attorney. PJ Crowley, former US state department spokesman who resigned recently after calling the treatment of Bradley Manning, "Ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist on domestic and foreign affairs and is quoted as describing WikiLeaks as "contemptible." Andrei Soldatov, Russian investigative journalist. Emily Bell, well-known British journalist and now is a major faculty member at Columbia Journalism School. John Kampfner, British journalist and chief of Index on Censorship, the organization which sponsored the event and he acted as moderator.
All in all from this bunch of experts: lawyers, politicians, journalists there was rather scattered feedback of what the status of free information is in a post-Wikileaks world. Now I didn't expect a tidy, uniform response since it was a panel made up of experts with very assorted views on the topic, but I sensed there was even some confusion and indecision within each individual panelist. So if the experts are undecided and therefore unprepared for a post-wikileaks world, it will be even harder for the rest of us.
Some general points from the event were:
*Wikileaks has made it so traditional journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of news, a fact which columnist Richard Cohen mourned greatly, but something many people considered imminent anyway.
*The paradox of Wikileaks - the goal of the non-profit organization is freedom of speech and the free flow of information, but by releasing those classified documents it might have put journalists all over the world in danger, or made their jobs much more difficult and sources much less trusting and these are the very people who were working toward that free information goal.
*Maybe the government has a right to some secrets and complete transparency shouldn't be a goal or maybe they should only be allowed secrets if in keeping those secrets they are directing protecting the people.
What do you think some of the effects of Wikileaks are - immediate or otherwise?
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