Pros and Cons of Wikileaks

Sylvie Kauffmann, Editorial Director of Le Monde in France, followed Assange by talking about WikiLeaks and investigative journalism. She apologized for Assange’s singling out two non-representative newspapers on site.

“What we agreed was that each paper had the documents,” Kauffmann said. “Each paper would work separately, but we agreed there were some regions we were more interested in.”

They would reduce every cable they decided to use, she said. They sent every reduced version to the papers and WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks decided to distribute the cables to more papers. Kauffmann said it was a good idea to distribute the papers as widely as they did because they ignored a lot of issues that would have been important to other regions.

“So, first, maybe we should wonder what has WikiLeaks changed in the way we do our job, which in the end, our job is bringing news into the open, including news which is supposed to be brought into the open,” she said.

Assange had two great ideas, according to Kauffmann. The first was the safe drop box. The other was seeking cooperation from mainstream media, which Kauffmann said she believes Assange regrets.

WikiLeaks also opened a debate about transparency, such as in France where there is no Freedom of Information Act.

“In the end, WikiLeaks failed to protect the whistleblower,” Kauffmann said.

WikiLeaks also made governments improve their security systems, so WikiLeaks is now paralyzed, she said.

There are three elements: the alliance between investigative journalism, tools and mainstream media staying strong, the old tools (such as good journalists) serving  as  a means to the massive amounts of data available on the internet and transparency as an uphill battle — a costly battle with the tools being used on both sides.