THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!

July 27, 2010

Right in front of our eyes the media is changing.  It used to be the Washington Post or New York Times uncovering Watergate or The Pentagon Papers.  Not much anymore.  Those media outlets don’t do much investigative reporting anymore, and rarely break real news.  Into the void steps WikiLeaks, the online invention from a convicted Australian hacker named Julian Assange, who has made a venture out of publishing top secret documents.  He’s a muckraker using modern technology, doing work the mainstream media won’t do anymore.  This week WikiLeaks published dozens of documents from the U.S. government about the war in Afghanistan.  That after the Obama administration tried to find him and arrest him for pilfering, to stop him from publishing.  They couldn’t find him.  But try as they might, there’s no stopping the “new champions of media freedom,” according to the Chicago Tribune.  As the traditional media falters, someone on the Internet is going to publish the docs.  That’s the way it goes in the new media world.  Now every government document, no matter how incriminating, may end up on our laptops.  This, as I said, changes everything.