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I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations. … The fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate about Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama • Saying one thing but immediately contradicting himself. If this data was so sensitive, how come it doesn’t reveal an issues that haven’t already informed our public debate? Security experts suggest that the documents don’t create an immediate threat, but note that the tendency is dangerous. Tying this into last week’s “Top Secret America” thang that the Post did, it’s possible that the government’s tendency to overclassify documents hit here too. But this sort of doublespeak simply doesn’t get us anywhere. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

There are more tools than ever to check things out, but once things start flying at light speed as it did with Sherrod, nobody seems able to hit the pause button.
Politicifact.com editor Bill Adair • Regarding the speed of the news cycle and how quickly it can flip. The best example of this is how, at the beginning of last week, The Washington Post made a bold bid to grab the week’s news cycle with their “Top Secret America” series, only to have it quickly pushed aside by Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson, who each scored cycle-grabbing headlines with much less work and much bigger payoff. And unlike the Post’s meticulously-checked series, some of the info Breitbart in particular had was straight-up wrong. And now this Wikileaks story proves it even more – the Web can own the news cycle far more easily than old-school media. And the old-school media, for good and bad, has to play catch-up. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

The amount of work that went into this is impressive. Beyond the stories themselves – an early Pulitzer contender about how the government’s intelligence apparatus has grown so huge that nobody knows how big it is – is an immaculately-designed mini-site, full of huge amounts of data about where all that intelligence money goes. It includes a pretty smart use of the jQuery carousel feature, immersive graphics (above), and data to last you for weeks. The Post has long been the ugliest of major old-guard newspapers, cluttered in all the ways that the Post itself is clean and classy. This – to us – proves that they have the capacity to turn that ship around. (Edit: Scott Clevenger notes that this series will also become a Frontline special on PBS.) source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

28 Jul 2010 09:53