I found it striking that veteran journalist Daniel Schorr passed away last week just as tens of thousands of classified U.S. documents relating to the Afghanistan war were published by WikiLeaks, a 3-year-old “whistle-blower” website that specializes in exposing secrets. Schorr also made it his specialty to expose secrets, from Nixon’s Watergate abuses to CIA assassination plots. For many journalists of a certain age (okay, mine), Schorr was an iconic figure, an old-school reporter who was willing—and even a bit eager—to challenge anyone, including his own paymasters, who tried to suppress the news. (See Obituaries.)
What a different media world we live in today. Schorr’s influence was derived from his being part of the great news team that Edward R. Murrow built at CBS. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, employs no professional journalists, lacks the resources to thoroughly verify all the leaks it receives, and eschews such journalism norms as seeking comment from affected parties. It’s all driven by a vaguely anarchistic agenda that considers powerful institutions like the U.S. military and multinational corporations to be inherent threats to human compassion and truth. Schorr, too, considered himself an advocate for truth, though as a product of what’s now derided as the mainstream media, he viewed his digging as a civic responsibility, not an act of subversion. Yet Schorr and the WikiLeaks activists shared a belief that in the absence of an informed citizenry, there can be no real accountability. They had something else in common, too. The government claims that some of the embarrassing secrets revealed by WikiLeaks jeopardize national security. Some things never change.
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