NY Times Exposing Redacted Diplomatic Cables: Despicable, Irresponsible and Self-serving

In my view it is pretty despicable that the end of your freedom, the end of your right to privacy and confidentiality is now permanently disintegrated not because of an idiot with a mobilecam who stuck your video on Youtube, not because of an angry ex who wants to show the world your sexual romps, and not because of Wikileaks, but because of none other than the once venerable New York Times who has stooped to new lows in deciding that in our new, unprotected reality, two wrongs make a right.

Am I exaggerating? Let me ask how you would feel if someone took private, confidential news of the important affairs of your life and applied the following rules in exposing it to the public.

Let’s take a closer look at a few key statements from the NY Times “A Note to Readers: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic Documents” regarding the release of thousands of United States Embassy documents. Just writing these words, I just can’t believe sensibilities have reached this level of perverted transformation.

1. We will ignore that you have marked these documents private, secret, not for sharing, confidential or classified. Why? well because they are interesting! Unbelievable. Despicable.

About 11,000 of the cables are marked “secret.” An additional 9,000 or so carry the label “noforn,” meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries, and 4,000 are marked “secret/noforn.” The rest are either marked with the less restrictive label “confidential” or are unclassified.

2. We will “try” to balance public against national security. Which means, well we could in fact make a mistake in that regard, but we will “try”. What if may I ask, some tired, overworked desk editor in fact screws up while playing with this fire?

The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks. Editors try to balance the value of the material to public understanding against potential dangers to the national interest.

3. We will, in general, try to protect you from reprisals. We did not state we will stringently and strictly with utmost care consider FIRST protecting you from reprisals. No, we will “in general” do so.

As a general rule we withhold secret information that would expose confidential sources to reprisals or that would reveal operational intelligence that might be useful to adversaries in war.

Would that be a general rule or a specific, stringent general rule carried out with the utmost general attention to protect me from perhaps general kinds of general reprisals or that would generally reveal something that might generally useful to adversaries in war?

Who gets to make the judgement call. Let me tell you who; the people who marked the documents SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL or CLASSIFIED in the first place! What right does the media have to supercede the decisions that are part of the mass, complex web of information and relationships with which our leaders protect and serve our interests? One cannot argue that the purpose of releasing these documents is to expose fraud or corruption in our government and therefore they should be released. It is being explicitly stated that is not the purpose of releasing these documents and so no argument in defense can be made in that regard.

4. And finally, giving themselves permission to publicly embarrass you or thrust you into a controversy, but not endanger your life, as if that should make you feel gratitude.

On the other hand, we are less likely to censor candid remarks simply because they might cause a diplomatic controversy or embarrass officials.

Oh this is wonderful. So information about your private life, which was, oh sorry, I’m repeating myself, PRIVATE, will be redacted before publishing to help keep you and others involved from danger, but information that might shame, embarrass or humiliate you with friends, destroy a few relationships here and there. Well sorry, we’ll go ahead and publish that because somehow its in the public interest. Well, we can say it is interesting to people, can’t we? I mean to say, it generates SALES. It generates TRAFFIC. It generates REVENUE.

Of course we would never defend the lies and corruption we have all witnessed in government over many decades, the lies and deceptions of the most recent ten years being amongst the most egregious we have had to bear. But I still defend what is good, what is ethical, what is right. I would exercise common sense in understanding and respecting rules and boundaries which exist to serve important purposes far more important than “its of interest to the public”

One could easily suggest that a person’s private conversations, comments and activities are protected from vultures, but apparently not. I give clients media training and one of the rules is to understand that every word out of your mouth can be printed in its entirety or in part, as the reporter sees fit. A second rule is that if there is something you do not want included, you can formally request beforehand and obtain agreement that the comments will be “off the record”.

Not even considering the subject matter, here you could be; protections and common sense respect that you thought meant something, blown to smithereens because websites and newspapers want more traffic and more readers and more revenue. Here you are finding redacted pieces of the private, secret, confidential statements of your views on very sensitive and important subjects, in print for all the world to see, at the mercy not of an unprofessional volunteer at Wikileaks, but of a NY Times editor.

The rhetorical brouhaha of the past week about TSA security screening procedures was pointless, inflammatory news, wastefully feeding on itself, going nowhere and thankfully revealed itself as such only a few days later.

This matter is far worse, with implications of a freshly drawn line in the sand, a transformed boundary, that will reverberate across corporate, political and media landscapes.

Mario Cavolo
Shanghai

Read more at Mario Cavolo