On May 4, 2011, at 6:41 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
> Doug Henwood: NB: Reuters, not Wikileaks.
>
> Somebody: So, snapshots of Osama's assassination are more newsworthy than Collateral Murder? Americans are very parochial, but Wikileaks has made major news in India, Greece, Brazil, Australia, Kenya, Russia, and on and on. I know you have an axe to grind here, but really. No serious people claim that Wikileaks didn't break any major stories anymore. Certainly it broke bigger stories than some slasher snapshots that may be released about this latest American-made massacre.
I know how you love thrashing self-righteously about, but I didn't say Wikileaks counted for nothing. I said that the material it covered occurred years earlier. I doubt that it had any bearing on what our leaders have been doing for the last few days - except maybe to be even more careful to write nothing down. I also said that its effects occurred mainly through the editorial filter of existing news organizations, not through a massive document dump. I don't know where you got the idea that "slasher snapshots" had any news effect, or that I claimed that they did. My point was that the real-time leaks occurred through Reuters, not Wikileaks or its offspring.
Doug