What the Pentagon leak story says about journalism
< < Go Back
the recent leak of US intelligence documents about sensitive global affairs doesn’t have a single moniker. The Washington Post and others called them “THE DISCORD LEAKS,” after the social platform where they surfaced. But this hasn’t universally caught on—perhaps because, as the New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac noted, the leaks aren’t about Discord. “It’s like calling something ‘the internet leaks,’” he wrote.
The semantic confusion hasn’t ended there. Mainstream commentators seem to agree that the alleged leaker, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira, is not a “whistleblower.” The leak seemed too scattershot to advance any unified argument about wrongdoing.
Teixeira was not a direct source for reporters, a fact that is hardly immaterial when it comes to weighing journalists’ obligations toward him. Still, there has been something, if not contradictory, then at least a bit jarring in major news organizations hyping Teixeira’s disclosures as front-page news on the one hand while racing to unmask and define him on the other.
If nothing else, this dynamic—and the aforementioned semantic fumbling—raises several intriguing notions about the media’s current relationship to sensitive information.
What happened this time was messier, raising questions about the media’s traditional self-conception as both gate-keeper and agenda-setter. In the past, we set the agenda and the internet talked about it. In Teixeira’s case something like the reverse is true.
More From CJR: