Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

The release today by Wikileaks of a huge bundle of documents relating to coalition forces’ activities in Afghanistan is a massive news story, and I’m expecting to see quite a few revelations over the coming weeks as more and more digging is done into the 90,000 documents.

Three news organisations got the jump on everybody else: The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel, and the coverage is already pretty impressive.

What’s amusing me, however, is the criticism directed at Wikileaks for the release of the documents. The White House came right out and said that Wikileaks was “irresponsible” in its actions, and the UK government has “lamented” the fact that the leak happened.

But, as Jay Rosen (media professor at NYU) points out in a really fantastic summary of the events, the White House has also said that it contains nothing new. Why, then, does it endanger national security?

If government policy has changed since the events contained in these files, surely the public should be aware of the facts that guided that change in policy?

Rosen’s post also has a great point about how Wikileaks is changing the playing field for both journalism and whistleblowers. Some have criticised Wikileaks for their agenda, or have said that they don’t practise journalism.

For me, Wikileaks really is “new media” in the truest sense of an over-used phrase. It has taken a source, protected their identity, yet disseminated their information to a much wider audience. If that isn’t journalism, I don’t know what is!

It’s really worth reading Rosen’s post to understand what it is that Wikileaks is achieving, day by day and also with the big exposes like today’s. People want transparency, and they don’t believe that they’re getting it from their governments and the companies that operate in their country. Wikileaks (and similar journalistic efforts) are vital.

If you include Metro, Britain has 11 daily national newspapers. Of those, eight had a large picture of the woman in the US/Russian spying arrests story on today’s front page. Photos of the other arrestees came there none.

She was variously captioned “Femme fatale”, “The redhead under the bed”, “The beauty who spied”, “Red menace”, and “The spy worthy of a Bond film”, as yet again the British newspaper industry showed that whilst a spy story is always interesting, a spy story with a photogenic woman involved is most definitely worthy of a front page splash.

For me, I thought it was a really good story anyway, with the details of the spies’ activities and attempts to keep things secret somewhat laughable. It’s as if their methods were based on crappy 60s TV shows, or a bad James Bond film (possibly an oxymoron there). It’s a solid story, yet the addition of a pretty woman has increased its interest to news editors. Are we, the readers, that shallow?

The three newspapers which didn’t use a large photo of her on the front page were the Sun, Daily Star and the FT. The latter two didn’t mention it at all, although the Sun did put a small photo of her on the front page, with the caption “Sexy spy”. As you could’ve expected, the Sun and Star’s websites have gone overboard on her.

Interestingly, the Star’s article has a video showing her Facebook profile, which seems to be where all of the other photos have come from. It’s quickly becoming the norm for photos taken from Facebook to be illustrating news stories, which perhaps should serve as a reminder to crank up those privacy settings.

In an effort to keep track of the absolute rank hypocrisy that the Daily Mail engages in seemingly daily, here’s the latest example:

• 30/06/10: The Mail engages in yet more BBC-bashing, this time pulling a couple of quotes from BBC message boards complaining about some of the crowd shots during this year’s Wimbledon tournament. Images of couples or “young women with iced drinks” are offending at least a couple of viewers, giving the Mail an opportunity to get apoplectic (oh, and to illustrate the article with photos of said “young women with iced drinks”…)

• 24/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Oh those Russians! Sharapova joins cheeky girls of Wimbledon’, illustrated by multiple pictures of Maria Sharapova slightly hoiking up her shorts.

• 24/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Long and short of it: Maria Kirilenko wears suitably skimpy dress on hottest day of Wimbledon so far’, illustrated by multiple pictures of Maria Kirilenko in a dress which isn’t actually that short.

• 22/06/10: Daily Mail publishes ‘Oh I say, the hemlines are shorter than ever at Wimbledon this year’, illustrated by multiple pictures of various players, and you can practically hear the author salivating as they wrote such lines as “who wore particularly skimpy outfits, showing off their toned thighs - and a little more besides”.

But it’s definitely the BBC who is in the wrong for showing a few members of the crowd during the tennis, isn’t it?! Fucking hypocrites.

And this is why we shouldn’t let media outrage and fear-mongering dictate such sensitive issues as government drug policy:

A few months ago, there was a whole flurry of hand-wringing in the media after a few people died after allegedly taking mephedrone, a legal high drug. In particular, two teenagers were among those deaths, and their parents were amongst the most vehement in calling for a ban on the drug.

Despite the lack of real scientific evidence as to the dangers of the drug, the government swiftly banned it, with immediate effect. A number of arrests followed for those continuing to sell it from websites and in clubs, and talk has risen of further bans on other legal high products.

The government basically took a completely kneejerk reaction to some fearmongering headlines, and now we have another drug added to the extensive list of illegal substances that really don’t have as much of a lethal effect as alcohol and cigarettes.

Oh, and the reason why reacting in this fashion is wrong? They didn’t have all the facts.

The toxicology reports released today for the two teenagers above have shown that in fact they had not taken any of that drug prior to their deaths.

This reminds me so much of the panic around swine flu, when a few people died at the start of that outbreak. There was a ridiculous amount of coverage, with screaming frontpage headlines proclaiming the apocalypse, for each death, but when those deaths were later shown to be entirely non-flu related, that news was relegated to page 94.

The fear had been put into the populace, and to be honest many won’t even have noticed the corrections or follow-ups. The media’s view of the story thus becomes the one which the public believes to have actually happened, despite that not being true.

And we’re seeing the same again now with mephedrone: a couple of scary headlines, and things change. The government’s reaction to swine flu cost us millions in buying Tamiflu and staffing a swine flu hotline. The new drugs policy has instantly criminalised thousands of people.

And this is why we shouldn’t let the media dictate government policy.