Time for an investigation

For students of international relations, there has been little in WikiLeaks that should have come as a surprise, indeed the main effect of the revelations appears to be that the world largely works as many educated people thought. They do introduce a few more solid facts into the foreign policy discourse.

As a journalist in a technical subject (debt finance), one of the surprises is that facts alone should make headlines. There are many facts – arguably far more significant than those in the Wikileaks - that could and should be reported. Why did this particular set of facts receive the star treatment?

The most obvious reason is the subject matter: the material sheds light onto the internal chatter of the world’s most powerful state. This is what They really think! The headlines claimed to reveal hidden facts about the world, we are suckers for being told secrets.

The second reason is the theatricality of the release of the information. Ahead of publication, there were claims that the material was so explosive it would bring down the US establishment. Moreover, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was under legal attack – what drama! – giving the human angle necessary to push the story through the usual 11-day news cycle. It is notable that following publication, such a high proportion of the news has focused on Assange, rather than the details of the cables, suggesting the information revealed is not sufficiently interesting to catch the interest of other news journalists. Indeed, that a Spanish judge privately thinks Russia is a quasi-Mafia state rarely generates 36-point headlines in the world’s media. This is not to dismiss the importance and potential interest of much of the information, but that journalism rarely works in the way that it thinks it should do.

Fetid

It is interesting that such secrets should be in our newspapers. It is unusual for a national newspaper today to reveal anything more surprising the contents of Charlie Brooker’s fetid imagination, or that England beat Australia in the cricket.

This is largely because in the place of investigative news journalism, with its careful understanding of detail and context, written by irritating and obsessive journalists, modern-day newspapers prefer scandal, alongside rewriting opinion and lifestyle concerns as news. Ever was it thus so, I hear you cry, but we cannot hide the fact that the media pack now moves in large herds, all with similar, safe anti-establishment opinions, reflecting precisely the prejudices of their targeted readers.

But alongside the rewritten press releases and wire stories, the literary rewrites of celebrity sensation and the elegant sports report, comes the out-of-the-blue data dump. The data dump provides an opportunity for the newspaper lucky enough – or rich enough – to polish the newpapers’ reputation for exclusives, and serves to boost the newspapers’ own perception of itself.

Do such data dumps enhance journalism? The Telegraph’s expose of MP’s expenses last year relied upon stolen information and the public’s lack of understanding of the context. The bulk of the bad claims were a product of a long-standing fudge between those that ran Parliament and MPs and the Fees Office. That the context weakened the strength of the story meant it was airbrushed out of the scandal.

Such strategic leaks tend to be quicker and easier for a newspaper to reveal. Though the Telegraph made great play of how many hours they spent processing information this should not distract us from how easy a story this was for them (once the six-figure sum was paid to the fence); if only every story we write was bought for us on a CD!

Longer-term, what do we get from these bulk downloads of information? The MPs’ story cleared one bunch of representatives out, smeared the reputation of Parliament and brought in a newer, slightly cleaner system for MPs expenses. The release of cables will lead the US to tighten its procedures for accessing such information; a few foreign governments will hesitate next time they are in conversation with the US ambassador.

These temporary infusions of facts give newspapers a shot in the arm but should not lead us to think we are living through some kind of golden age for investigative journalism. Buying a dodgy CD, or doing a deal with Julian Assange, does not in itself halt the decline in longer-term, patient journalism that only large news organisations can support.