Wikileaks – To publish or not to publish
Anybody who has ever had lunch, tea/coffee or dinner with a western diplomat knows that they do it more for the purposes of picking brains than for any other reason. If you are confronted with that kind of situation, you have the advantage of either sealing your lips or you should live with the morbid […]
Anybody who has ever had lunch, tea/coffee or dinner with a western diplomat knows that they do it more for the purposes of picking brains than for any other reason. If you are confronted with that kind of situation, you have the advantage of either sealing your lips or you should live with the morbid fear that anything you say in the course of that event would be used in evidence against you. This is what diplomacy entails one way or another. Of course, that has made the job of diplomats quite difficult today as trust is now bruised. But that is a topic for another day.
Until they are de-classified, diplomatic cables are supposed to be the exclusive rights of the governments for which they are meant. And for bridging that gap, the US for instance, want Julian Assange, the brain behind Wikileaks brought to its country to face the law. The actions of his organisation jeopardises US diplomacy on a global scale but so would some argue that the activities of western countries largely jeopardises global entente.
Back to the professionalism debate, the question we need to ask is whether Wikileaks is a media outfit in the traditional league with which we classify Reuters, AP, AFP or our own NAN? To any rational mind, Wikileaks is a whistle-blower classified in the same order as Amnesty International or any such organisation. Assange may be a trained journalist, but what his organisation does is to take espionage from the realm of secrecy and bring it to the public domain. This has caused problems for diplomacy but filled a yearning information gap for the Nigerian public and others who often wonder what happens behind the iron curtains of governance. Wikileaks is helping to fill a yawning information gap and answers the questions agitating the minds of the general public about their secretive leaders. While this may be a problem for an open democratic society with the need to keep certain things under wraps, there is no such need for us who live in a depraved society and are brutalised by the effects of secrecy in government and governance.
In the western society, what is hidden from the preying eyes of the reporter is finally exposed in memoirs. Whatever missing puzzles of the Clinton Presidency is eventually pieced together in Bill Clinton – My Life and his wife’s piece, Living History. Memoir-writing helps the society to balance the scales and are usually bestsellers. It is not the same in Africa. African journalists are either ranked low on the social ladder or/and insufficiently connected to effectively chronicle events. The dictum – The Press is free to do as it is told, applies aptly here. A look at newspaper titles gives the impression of news brewed from the same pot.
Our society’s quest for hard news is so poor because governance has been such a disappointment that exclusives don’t sell. The public seem to have resigned itself to the norm that rulers live to loot and misrule with impunity and that those indicted get off with a slap on the wrist. Our society’s state of incomplete metamorphosis, in which it is neither fully western nor traditional, keeps interests in tabloid journalism within thin limits. For instance, how do you determine that a mistress is not a wife in the waiting in a polygamous society?
Yet, the larger society is curious to know what goes on in government in the absence of memoirs. Which Nigerian is not interested in knowing what went down under Obasanjo’s pseudo-democracy or what the Cabal was doing under Yar’adua? Or why, in spite of her poor sense of grammar, Mrs Jonathan takes the air on national television without a written script? Wikileaks fills the gap. By serialising them, editors are fulfilling history based on a need to know. An editor does not need to ask for confirmations of any of the leaked cables other than certify that he is quoting from it any more than they have to look for Soyinka’s age-mates to confirm the contents of Ake, the Years of Childhood.
Can the leaked contents of a diplomatic cable gathered in Nigeria on prominent Nigerians be classified as exclusive? That would be stretching it too far. Do editors owe it a duty to their readers to either confirm or deny these reports? My answer would be no. It suffices to state the source. To my mind, no further evidence or corroboration is required and none need be given. Curiously a significant proportion of those against the serialisation are either retired journalists in other practices or cross-over civil servants. It is doubtful if a case of libel can stand on a Wikileaks report any other way than a hospital statistics turned into an analytical piece of journalistic news. It is past figures condensed for public consumption.