The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to comments made by executive editor Bill Keller in an interview with the Cutline blog. Keller said that the plan is still in its formative stages, but the idea is to create a “kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers,” to make it easier for them to contact the paper and deliver information. And the Times isn’t the only one doing this: Al-Jazeera has already launched its own drop-box for leaks, and recently released thousands of documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
When WikiLeaks first burst into public view last year with a treasure trove of secret documents about the Iraq war, including a classified video of an American military attack on civilians, one of the first things some media-industry observers wondered was: why didn’t the sources of this material — widely believed to be Bradley Manning, a U.S. intelligence officer now in a military prison in Guantanamo Bay — just go directly to a newspaper like the New York Times instead of leaking it to some shadowy organization like WikiLeaks? The New York Times probably wondered that too, which is why it’s not surprising to hear that the paper is working on its own digital tip line.
In some ways, it’s surprising that it has taken the NYT and other newspapers this long to come up with this idea. Newspapers and other media outlets have always relied on those with access to secret or confidential information — either about companies or about governments — to deliver material in brown envelopes that are dropped off at the front desk or handed over to people in parking garages, as the famous Watergate documents were in **. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail compared WikiLeaks to a brown envelope when it first came to prominence, and said it was nothing more than a middleman, which to a large extent is true.
The key difference with an entity like WikiLeaks, however, is that it is also a publisher — it can instantly release whatever documents it wishes its own web site or dozens of other sites that it has relationships with, although so far it has only released the same documents that the New York Times and The Guardian and other media outlets have (with names of some individuals redacted to prevent them from being targeted). The main thing that WikiLeaks gains by working with the NYT and other traditional media entities is a broader reach — in effect, publicity for the leaks, as Icelandic MP and early WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir explained in a recent speech in Toronto.
So will more leakers go direct to either the New York Times or Al-Jazeera? Possibly. But the one thing that sources gain by going through WikiLeaks instead of a specific media outlet is the knowledge that they aren’t relying on one newspaper’s view of the documents — in other words, that the New York Times doesn’t control what gets released and what doesn’t, or what gets written about and what doesn’t, since WikiLeaks typically works with several competing organizations at once. For anyone who remembers how the Times behaved when it was reporting about the issues leading up to the Iraq War, that could be a very powerful incentive to use WikiLeaks rather than going direct.
But WikiLeaks is about to get some more competition on that front as well: a new organization called OpenLeaks, set up by former WikiLeaks staffer **, is expected to launch soon with a much more distributed model that was developed in part as a response to criticism about WikiLeaks and the behavior of front-man Julian Assange. For better or worse, the organization appears to have opened a Pandora’s box when it comes to political transparency that may never be closed.