By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief
If you follow the Chronicle on Facebook or Twitter you might have seen an odd link go up. “WikiLeaks publishes video of American soldiers allegedly slaying civilians and reporters in Baghdad” was a post we put up about something that we as a staff felt was important. Attached with it was the disclaimer “DISCLAIMER: While we typically do not cover world news, we as a staff felt we had a duty to cover this in an act of solidarity for reporters allegedly killed.”
The context for all of this was that WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to leaking classified documents and establishing international transparency, put up a Youtube video of American soldiers killing civilians and two Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007.
As a policy we usually don’t cover world news but we made an exception for the incident. By the middle of the day it was clear that the video wasn’t getting enough hits to be covered by mainstream media and we decided that covering it could help get enough hits to get attention.
The bigger issue this brings up is a sad reality of the way American news has been operating in the last decade. It’s also something that journalism students are being taught. So much news is centered on reporting from a press release that real news isn’t breaking.
The incident depicted in the WikiLeaks video could have very possibly been concrete evidence of a military cover-up, but American news agencies weren’t even interested. MSNBC didn’t even bother covering it, while CNN did so begrudgingly and FOXnews completely missed the point (obviously).
At least The New York Times covered it the next day at the end of the international section. And the depressing thing about that is that the military released false information about the 2007 incident in a New York Times article.
So an American newspaper was given video proof of falsifying information they themselves covered, and no hard punches were pulled. The Chronicle in the end linked to a BBC article that we felt was far more substantial.
And journalists are scratching their heads as to why they’re not needed anymore. At least with dreadful opinion-blogs like Gawker, the questions are probing and they can get the truth out.
Just something to think about I guess.
