Ephemeral and nothing
Within the same week, terrorists murdered a journalist in Athens in a gangland-style hail of bullets and, somewhere on the Internet, a website devoted to leaking information on government abuses posted tens of thousands of classified US military documents with details on the war in Afghanistan. The two seemingly unrelated incidents show how much journalism is changing, how the public can be informed or misinformed and how big the stakes are when important information is involved. Sokratis Giolias, the founder of troktiko.gr, a clearinghouse for news and rumors with anonymous purveyors, was ambushed in his apartment block’s entrance on July 26. The Sect of Revolutionaries, a relative newcomer on Greece’s lively urban guerrilla scene claimed responsibility. It is not clear why Giolias was singled out, other than the fact that – unarmed and alone – he was an easy target. Very few people knew of his involvement with Troktiko, which web statistics consistently placed among the top 10 sites in Greece. Along with search engines, porn and sports, this no-budget, blog-format site was way ahead of those carrying the content of established newspapers. With Giolias’s death, the site suspended operations indefinitely. Like a number of such sites in Greece, troktiko.gr presented itself as fast and fearless in posting whatever it fancied and in picking fights. It was also anonymous. Such sites attract readers in great waves, depending on the story, but they lose them just as easily. They need a steady stream of titillation to maintain their numbers. Anonymity does not cultivate loyalty. It means the founders of such cunningly manipulated notice boards are neither accountable nor reliable. The real revelation – the news – is lost in a torrent of uncorroborated verbiage. These sites can create a momentary furor, but their impact is truly ephemeral: When their founders are murdered or just walk away, they disappear as if they never existed. In Giolias and his murder we see the power of the individual in today’s media landscape and his weakness. The key issue is accountability and durability. The primary task of journalism is to inform the public and to make those who wield any form of power accountable. This means that the news medium must be able to stand up to the powerful forces that will try to destroy it or turn it into an accessory to their crimes. In addition, the news medium must be accountable for its actions. Two shining examples are The New York Times’ publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post’s long investigation into a break-in at the Watergate building in 1974. In the first case, the publication of the US Defense Department’s top-secret analysis revealed that presidents had consistently been lying to the public regarding their country’s growing military involvement in Southeast Asia; the latter investigation forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Both newspapers faced huge opposition from powerful political forces and legal action that would have destroyed or humbled weaker organizations. Such revelations have changed the course of history, but it is the millions of smaller ones occurring every day that make the role of journalists so important and often so difficult and dangerous. The wikileaks.org posting of some 92,000 documents revealing ground-level activities of the US military in Afghanistan is somewhere between the exclusive revelations that are newspapers’ staple and the anonymous postings of a lone blogger with an unknown source with unknown motives. It is undeniably interesting because it is authentic; without context, without analysis, though, it is meaningless. No doubt that is why WikiLeaks shared the unmasticated mass of information in advance with The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel – to confirm its authenticity, to provide a coherent synopsis to the reader, to gain the credibility that comes after years of revelations and for paying the price for them. Digital «notice boards» like WikiLeaks or Troktiko cannot be expected to protect their sources indefinitely, nor the people whom those sources name. These issues are at the core of a news medium’s credibility. The Internet and the older media can only survive if they work together to enrich their content – to their benefit and society’s. Without the principles and methods of traditional news media, revelations reveal nothing.
