The leaks are still very useful for them. While the change came from misquoting Newsweek, you and a few here can see that it was, plausibly, a mistake; but that excuse fades when one takes into account that Trump and others have not talked that back after that mistake was reported. A lot of the misquoted emails from the climategate “scandal” were mixed and regurgitated like that and the right wing sources that repeat the misquotes never corrected the record. Meaning that many in the right wing echo chamber remain ignorant about those corrections. And still find them in searches when they look for “information” about an issue.
The key revelations by Wikileaks have not been disinformation by and large. They are leaked facts. I think there’s a big problem with this kind of hack/leaking, which I’m actually glad more people (liberal Democrats) acknowledge now that it’s being done against their candidate than when it was against US surveillance and other WOT policies. Unfortunately some people who realized it was a problem then (rightist populists, ie Trump supporters) forget that it still is.
Anyway the problem is not that the information is false or itself ‘propaganda’ (as in false*). It’s that the hacker/leakers get to aim the embarrassment selectively. Which media sometimes also does in its conventional means of finding info. But there’s a much lower barrier to entry to old fashioned reporting, to bring on competition, than hacking if it takes eg. Russian state supported entities to do it. And it’s also that the world is simply not better off if nothing is secret.
*a not so useful word IMO because in English it’s undergone a gradual evolution from more like ‘official publicity’ to ‘lies’ and not everyone is in the same point of the evolution. Moreover the word translates literally to words in other key languages which do mean ‘official publicity’, which is relevant for example wrt the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese word is translated either ‘publicity’ or ‘propaganda’.
On Hillary’s transcripts, people have focused in on stuff like public/private positions, open borders, and so on, but there’s some fun stuff in there. My favorite so far is the Putin tiger story.
And then…they kissed.
It’s like when the facts about American torture or mass spying and data collection came out. Anyone who was paying attention knew it was happening, but they tended to be called conspiracy theorists or America haters. It’s harder to make quips about tin foil hats when you have everything down to the department Powerpoint presentations. Before this, anyone saying Hillary was lying and was for open borders and TPP could be dismissed as an addled victim of Breitbart. No way to Correct the Record on this one.
The feigned outrage I’m seeing over the idea that a politician doesn’t tell the public their true beliefs is precious, though.
OK, grant for the sake of argument that Wikileaks is reporting everything exactly as it came to them, and that they’re not altering anything. That still doesn’t mean anything, if it was already lies when it got to them. What evidence do we have that it’s not all lies? Only the word of people whom we already know beyond doubt to have behaved unethically. Why should we take the word of thieves and liars?
They didn’t publish the Panama Papers, and in fact claimed that the Panama Papers were a US information operation to discredit Putin and destabilize Russia. Sorry, Wikileaks is clearly on the side of the Russians at a minimum, not unbiased leakers who want to expose everyone who behaves badly.
Plus, there is a lot else wrong with Wikileaks no matter who they they want to support. Indiscriminate leaking disempowers dissent and scrutiny of actual misbehavior by the powerful.
Zeynep Tufekci has a very good rant about it on Twitter and it is her area of expertise, the effects of technology on politics and society. I hope she writes a full article about it since she has written for the NYT recently.
Wikileaks criticized the ICJI for just the kind of selective leaking some here are potentially accusing Wikileaks of. (tweet) And while Wikileaks did initially accuse the ICJI of bias against Russia, through their selective leaking, that doesn’t make them biased for Russia. Also they later retracted the accusation, saying that “Claims that #PanamaPapers themselves are a ‘plot’ against Russia are nonsense.”
Russian mouthpiece agrees with Wikileaks that the Panama papers leak was selectively targeted at Russia
I think your post exemplifies a problem we have had with Russia even since before the end of the Cold War.
I am no fan of Russia or Putin, and his attempts to deliberately influence the US elections with hacks, leaks, and the like are indeed an outrage. But again, if you look at it from the point of view of Russia, is the United States also not trying to apply pressure to a regime? Does this pressure not also potentially threaten the regime’s ability to govern?
The United States coordinates with our allies (economic and political partners) to impose sanctions because it has that tool to use. Russia does not have the tools to fight back. So it uses hacking, which is a tool that it actually does possess. We’re threatening Russia’s regime, and Russia is now retaliating in kind by threatening the process by which we establish our regime.
You say that this is an act of war, and we can definitely interpret it that way, but sanctions are also an act of war – sanctions led to World War Two in both Europe and Asia. We should stop operating with the assumption that sanctions are “soft” tools and that they will automatically induce capitulation to American interests. That’s not necessarily what happens. This, by the way, is one problem I actually do have with Hillary Clinton, as I see her buying into this same bullshit Pentagon-State Department neo-colonial manual on how to deal with regimes we don’t like.
To add to that, there is a lot of background here that explains why Russia has been displeased with the United States since 1991. This is not to say that I agree with Russia or Putin – I absolutely do not. But the United States operates with a blind assumption of political, economic, and even cultural supremacy. Not everyone buys into those same assumptions.
Diplomacy is far cheaper than this. Diplomacy is the good angel that convinced the United States that we could remove missile batteries in Turkey (which nobody ever talks about in American history books) in exchange for Soviet missiles being moved from Cuba. Diplomacy is the good angel that convinced the Chinese, who were until a year ago, anti-American hacker #1 to, well, stop hacking. Diplomacy can work with Russia but we need to stop “negotiating” with the assumption of superiority.
I know it’s hackery but still, ordinary folk are going to have reactions. I think it’s beyond clear that Assange is now a pro-Russian hacker. But what do less partisan Americans make of it? For many of them, the “truth” is what matters.
And it is incredibly obvious to anyone with critical thinking skills (which, to be fair, is a shrinking portion of the electorate) how they are slanting, in any given article.
It’s probably impossible to have unbiased news in this day and age, in part because “false equivalence” is an almost necessary part of journalism. But it’s not impossible for thinking individuals to take the news from a variety of sources, identify spin and bias, and maintain some semblance of objectivity.
I dismiss this “They all do it equally” crap as an excuse for whatever “facts” the person spewing it is trying to push. It is the equivalent of a child claiming “But everybody does it!” when caught doing something wrong. There are news outlets that do heavy spin in both their news and their opinion divisions, there are some that try to keep at least a semblance of impartiality when it comes to their news, there are some that try their very best to just report the news to the best of their ability, and there are all the others that fall somewhere along that scale. If they were really all the same, then there would be no problem starting a thread about, say MSNBC that would be as easy to fill with incidents of reporting malfeasance as it is regarding Fox News in this thread.
If a slanted story is wrong, then it is wrong-period. I don’t care if little Johnny Jones down the street does it, too.
My real problem with “both sides do it” is that it’s a convenient excuse for intellectually lazy people to abdicate their responsibility to do their homework and to think about which sources are accurate and which ones are biased. Being an informed voter actually does require a lot of homework, and unfortunately our society doesn’t want to study; it wants to be entertained. There are consequences for not doing homework.
I saw your post and thought right away, “oh, the NH primaries”.
Then I googled it and saw the news item. It was a few days before. So, the NH primary polls.
Might have been a reaction to Trump’s, not Sander’s, polls, and in one of the nation’s earliest primaries, too.
I searched for it on Wikileaks. Searched in many ways. Didn’t find anything. There was a screenshot in the news item but no Wikileaks link.
For all I know, it’s fake. Like this one, mentioned earlier in this thread. Which I didn’t find on Wikileaks either.
But anyway… it’s an utterly understandable, natural response. Something I would have said or emailed, under the circumstances. Why would anybody think such a private reaction, to a poll result, under the circumstances, reflects badly on Clinton in any way??
Are Americans really this thin-skinned at taking it in, while at the same time so zealous at dishing it out?
I clicked through some of the Breitbart news posts about the Clinton Wikileaks emails (none from Clinton BTW, all of them from campaign staffers). Didn’t see anything even remotely objectionable, even as spun by Breitbart. I thought many reflected positively on Clinton and her campaign, or at worst, neutrally.
It must be silly season for scandals.
BTW This whole thing is already being spun into vicious, fact-free, exaggerated anti-Trump and anti-Russian counter-propaganda by Clinton supporters, per this Glenn Greenwald blog.
That would qualify for, “Quite alot of people doing it equally!”
Where did I say “they all do it equally”??? I don’t believe they do.
However, if you can’t occasionally identify that individual stories seems to be written to favor a certain viewpoint, on ANY news outlet, you aren’t paying close enough attention.
When the targets of hack/leaks don’t make any claim that the documents are false or have been altered, that is sufficient evidence to reasonably assume they are genuine.
It doesn’t mean a mass of leaked documents are all to be assumed real and unaltered before review. But if a few documents or passages become a big political issue, and it would seldom be more than a few given the public’s limited bandwidth and attention span, and the target doesn’t claim they are fake or altered, that tells you practically speaking they’re valid, aside from basically irrelevant moralizing about how the documents got out in the first place. Plenty of revelations by conventional crusading journalists involve illegality on the part of their sources, though see my post above the problem I still see with state hacker/wikileaks v journalists.
Now if there was a case where a key hack/leaked document or few were very damaging, a target claimed they were fake, but their non-hacking critics believed them real, then OK that would be a question of relative credibility of target v hacker/intermediary. But that’s seldom happened if at all with wikileaks stuff (the case recently with Trump reading from what was supposedly a Podesta email but actually some cut and paste from a media article wasn’t wikileaks’ fault, and was exposed immediately anyway).
The important point to me is this: After that email was exposed as being changed Trump AFAIK has not acknowledged yet that it was altered, come to think of it, that goes for most of the right wing info-sphere. Nothing immediate about that, let me tell you.
It should not be missed that days are passing before any staff member or Trump admits they were had, and that is one big reason no one should vote for Trump, he is very easy to misled; and so is his personnel, if Trump is elected that personnel is bound to not only do mistakes, but to do even the worst ones: not admitting those mistakes, and making the original mistakes worse.
That makes assessments of of how they will behave in serious crises to be discouraging.
Trump famously asked “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” during the primary season and, until the last week’s events, has been holding a consistent lead there. Easy to rationalize “Oh, he means those OTHER people…”
