Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

Digital technology has also allowed citizen journalism to flourish. The Pew Center examined the trend in the United States in 2010 and noted growth and creativity among citizen-journalists, particularly at the local level. At the national level, it was a “citizen-journalist” who captured one of the most controversial lines uttered by candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign, that some small-town voters might be “bitter; they cling to guns or religion.” 87And it was an amateur who in 2013 helped prove that chemical weapons had been used in Syria. 88

Around the world, citizen-journalists (or just plain citizens) have been credited with sparking revolutions. Citizens were able to “evad[e] the censors in Iran and communicat[e] from the earthquake disaster zone in Haiti,” according to Pew. 89Citizen-journalists helped spread information through social media during the Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, as well as during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

But along with the reality of online communication often comes a fantasy. There is a propensity, particularly among the social-media–fetishizing young, to credit social media with what it is constitutionally incapable of: expunging memory and wiping history clean. Getting the message out and putting crowds in the streets do not, on their own, change the system or society. (Witness, for instance, the return of the generals in Egypt within just one short year of the democratic election that followed the Arab Spring.) Rah-rah social media too often goes hand in hand with a dangerous ahistorical clean-slate view of the world.

And so-called “pro-am” collaborations continue to spring up, with amateurs providing source materials or working in a more active way with the professionals who can use their outlet to widely disseminate the story or information. One example is the liberal activist site Alternet and its “Bubble Barons” project, which called on citizens to help build more complete profiles and trace the connections of sixty-seven selected billionaires. 90

There are obvious benefits to more open participation in journalism through digital technology. Many believe that the old media have been corrupted by their proximity to power, and with good reason. A spectacular example is that of the New York Times reporter Judith Miller. A solid case has been made that Miller acted not as a journalist but as a bullhorn for a George W. Bush administration bent on war with Iraq, and Miller eventually resigned. 91

Regular people who don’t derive their salary and status from access to newsmakers and power brokers may be more likely to challenge them. Amateurs also might be more likely to avoid the group-think and attachment to narrative that can happen within, say, the White House or Pentagon press corps. The blogosphere and, increasingly, Twitter users can serve as on-the-spot fact-checkers and truth-squadders.

But there are serious concerns with digital cowboys. Former beat reporters or ordinary citizens who create niche blogs are bound to be targeted by companies and interest groups related to that topic in hopes of getting their message out. Influence groups hire social-media specialists, and it can be hard to tell the difference between someone attempting to be objective and someone working an agenda. Certainly there is no uniform code of conduct among people putting out “information” or their own self-styled “news” in hopes of reaching the public. There’s really no way to discern motive or source of funding, unless an individual decides to disclose them, and there’s no institution enforcing ethics. In other words, accountability is not part of the latticework.

In dissing public institutions like the old media and opting for self-assemblage, we have seeded a muddled model. Consider Julian Assange, probably the best-known digital cowboy, and his document-revealing WikiLeaks. He encapsulates the promise of the age—and yet provides a case study in unaccountability and what can go awry with nontraditional “truth-seekers.” Assange is a declared combatant in information warfare: a high-tech vigilante committed to radical transparency in governance. Several years before Edward Snowden leaked documents to Glenn Greenwald, Assange burst onto the scene in 2010 with his massive leak of Pentagon documents involving America’s wars and sensitive diplomatic relations. He was immediately hailed by many on the left as journalism’s savior. But while he demanded transparency from others, there was little or no transparency in his own practices at WikiLeaks. The New Yorker put it this way, well before Assange ran into legal trouble: “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” 92

It quickly became clear that there never was and perhaps never will be a “real institution.” WikiLeaks is synonymous with one figure—Julian Assange—and Assange himself is deeply problematic. With the lack of an institution comes the lack of standards and principles according to which events are deemed newsworthy. In their absence, the choice of what documents to release becomes an idiosyncratic decision. Assange’s dealings have been so contentious that the New York Times ran a critical profile of him, describing “. . . erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur” the same day it released a massive leak of Iraq war documents. 93The Times also chose not to link to WikiLeaks’s own site. It said this was not intended as a slight, but because it wasn’t sure that Assange had taken care (or perhaps didn’t have the expertise or knowledge) to redact enough names or other revealing details that could endanger lives. 94

Assange, of course, embodies the full panoply of pros and cons of this new era of media/Internet. He has the passion and technical savvy that many, if not most, of the lumbering media giants lack. (And he does deserve some credit for helping foster the ambitions of Edward Snowden, who “broke the biggest story of the last five years,” as one media analyst put it.) But objectivity and transparency are scarcely to be found in his operation, functioning as he does without standards of practice or clear lines of accountability. For instance, his “hactivism” is focused almost entirely on the United States and Western targets, not much on deserving places like China or Russia. And by turning WikiLeaks into a vanity project, he has failed to create an institution with a broad bench of support that could live on without him. His personal legal troubles have muddied the enterprise’s ostensible ideals. So what might have been a group committed to more open government and policymaking has devolved into a cross between an international thriller, a scandal investigation (involving allegations of sexual abuse), and a study in grandiosity.

WHEN POWER BROKERS RUSH IN

Power brokers have ridden the tides of change created by the destruction of the old media and the rise of the media/Internet behemoth. Shadow elites, shadow lobbyists, and their fellows have simultaneously exploited both developments.

Colonizing the Internet

Consider this tweet:

The IDF has begun a widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives in the #Gaza Strip, chief among them #Hamas & Islamic Jihad targets.

—Israeli Defense Forces Twitter feed

(@IDFSpokesperson), November 12, 2012

This was surely the first-ever war declared on Twitter—and likely not the last. In November 2012, Israel and Hamas used their respective Twitter feeds (@IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade) to battle in real time for hearts and minds, while the actual blood-and-guts battle was being waged in Gaza. This was just the latest—and perhaps the most dramatic—case of powerful forces able to present their side, free of context and unimpeded by reporter-gatekeepers.