Update 2
In San Francisco, our part of the January 15th global protests for Wikileaks will focus on this issue; we are calling it a Media Intervention for Wikileaks.
Update
The article I was looking for is here. Doesn’t mention Time or TNR, though.
The Big Lie
The biggest lie is that Wikileaks “indiscriminately dumped” 250,000 unredacted cables on the Web. The truth is that as of January 4th, 2011, they have released just under 2000 diplomatic cables, each of them carefully vetted by one of their partner news organizations. Glenn Greenwald has done a great job of attempting to slay this dragon.
Many, many mainstream media outlets have repeated this lie. Sometimes an organization is inconsistent, and tells the truth sometimes and the lie other times. We need to force each and every one to always say the truth.
NPR recently corrected their lie and apologized. This is great news! But just the beginning….
Somewhere out there I thought I read a list of all the other orgs and quotes and links to this big lie. Can’t find it – so I’m putting up this. Please add examples in the comments.
Easy start: Time: “But the law is too broad a brush to try to draw a distinction between WikiLeaks’ indiscriminate posting of the cables — which Burns called “nihilistic” — and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times, Abrams said.” This was the subject of an article by Glenn Greenwald.
The New Republic: “…Wikileaks would have dumped that information, along with the other 250,000 cables.”
Fish Rock Road 