On the one hand, there is an underlying philosophy that says all information should be made public and that we have a right to know what is being said behind closed doors. In a country faced with the prospect of a Media Tribunal and with a prevailing hostility to the media from many in government, I would usually support any attempt to rip back the covers on nefarious deals, sinister conversations, backhanders and perception-fiddling from those in power. Where communication is between two paid officials – or even one official and another non-public servant – and it is intended to manage a deception or crime, I’m all for grabbing it and turning it into a headline. And I think whistle-blowers on such activity should be protected and celebrated for their bravery.

Some of what Wikileaks has published is important. Jack Shafer, writing on Slate.com, says the leak “shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand.” It is important that we know that, and uncomfortable for those in power to realise that they haven’t gotten away with it.

On the other side of the coin, though (and this is what bugs me), a mass evacuation of the bowels of American diplomacy onto computer screens around the world, while titillating and intriguing for the person on the street, isn’t a managed leak. It’s unnecessary and doesn’t serve to prevent or reveal a crime. And so it smacks of sensationalism for headlines sake.

The world of diplomacy is a mystery to me. Like many others, I enjoy spy movies where you can pretend to get an insight into the hidden machinations of foreign governments and their agents. I have often wondered what world leaders really think about each other – it is all smiles for the cameras, handshakes at the press conference accompanied by a friendly, bland “the engagement was fruitful” media statement. But as the doors of the conference room swing shut and world leaders are left alone, the leaders re-humanise. As Barrack Obama sinks into his pillow for the night at some big summit, he turns to Michelle and says…..what? Does he like David Cameron and Vladmir Putin? Does he think Gaddaffi is a gigolo? Would he dance with Angela Merkel? I’d love to know. But I don’t need to know, and that’s where Wikileaks crosses the line – their currency has moved from being what we need to know to keep the world safe and our leaders honest, to what we merely enjoy finding out. It is tabloid journalism for the New York Times reader.

Diplomacy is important. Those glib statements and public smiles are as necessary as they may be dishonest. For countries to get on with each other and avoid blowing each other up, the relationship can’t be managed like a marriage or real-world friendship. Diplomacy is a delicate dance around egos, issues, personalities and conflicting pressures. Yes, it is insincere and occasionally dishonest. But I, for one, would rather prefer that Barrack Obama looks Kim Il-sung in the eye and says “nice tie, and thank you for that delicious puppy-stew” and not mean it, than is brutally honest with him (“the tie is too garish for your Salvation Army suit and the puppy was tough and overspiced”) and bring on a nuclear war. Hell hath no fury like a dictator scorned.

And so publishing en masse decades of private communications between governments strikes me as being gratuitous. Wikileaks would argue that we have a right to know what gets written and said behind closed doors. My question is….do we? From where do we derive that right? The inner workings of diplomacy, the tactical shuffles between foreign powers need to be, well, diplomatic. Boy meets girl, they have a good evening together, the next day boy SMS’s his best friend to tell him how it went. Does girl have a right to know what the SMS says? Sure, she may desperately want to know, but isn’t it better for the steady growth of their relationship and the delicate rules of engagement that surround first encounters that his true feelings get revealed in a different way, over time? The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe’s real views on Robert Mugabe are interesting and nice to know, but let’s not confuse that with some sort of imagined right.

And that’s my problem with Wikileaks, and also my dilemma. A wholesale, unfiltered dump of information like this is gratuitous and doesn’t draw any distinction between what is critical information and what is simply salacious. The dilemma is, and I see this clearly, that in order for it to be filtered someone needs to do the filtering, which already imposes an agenda onto the information. It is an unresolvable dilemma, so the question becomes – who do we trust more?

It’s difficult to write of Wikileaks without some mention of the man who runs the place. Particularly when his own personality and behavior give such vital clues to the real reason behind the site. Watching him perform, it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than that he thinks he is in his very own spy movie. His brow is creased with the importance of his purpose, his burden is heavy, but he soldiers on in the name of free information. Jack Shafer, again, describes him best: “he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions.” Quite.

And don’t expect any top secret documents to be leaked from the trenches of Assange’s war. Former staffers who speak publicly of his ego and paranoia are smeared and described as “peripheral figures… spreading poison”.  Assange is often less than honest himself. On 19 October this year he vehemently denied that Wikileaks was about to publish tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the Iraq war. Three days later, he did just that. Then there is his interview with CNN where, peeved at the way things were going (the interviewer dared to go down a line of questioning that questioned his credibility), he walked out in a huff. A short while later he tried to defend himself to CNN’s Larry King, saying that he took offense because CNN should have been focusing on the real issues – those who had died in Iraq, and not on the tabloid stuff. In other words, Assange wants to set the agenda. And despite his veneer of loved-up openness, he knows what is best for the media to report on and will insist that they listen to him. The old schoolyard taunt “he can give but he cannot take” springs to mind. Why should every American diplomat and embassy staffer be fair game – regardless of what they have written or who they are – but yet Assange himself has things he refuses to talk about? No matter what Wikileaks puports to be, it is also a massive monument to Assange’s ego.

The world is a dangerous place these days, and the stakes in the political game are high. Corruption is rife in both government and the private sector, and the media have a critical role in investigating and telling us about it. I want a free, robust media, and we need a knight in shining armour. But I don’t think that Julien Assange is it.

Courtesy of the Sunday Pepper – a Ugandan newspaper.

Now that I’m part of the TsuTweetie (my word – feel free to spread it) I’m intrigued at how rapidly it has gained momentum, in much the same way Google and Facebook did in their early years. Determined not to miss the boat, the purveyors of Old Media are rushing to embrace it. Sky has a fully fledged “Twitter Correspondent” in the form of Ruth Barnett (bizarrely pictured here in front of, um, YouTube. Hey Social Media all looks the same, doesn’t it?)

Anyway seeing how the Twitstream has been the lifeline for those protesting the election results in Iran has been amazing. It has been a rallying cry for protesters, an indispensible tool for organising and for telling the world what is happening on the ground. Even British actor Stephen Fry has become a Twit-tivist, Tweeting lists of proxies that haven’t been shut down by the government so people in Iran can continue reaching out to the world. So important has it become that the US State Department apparantly contacted Twitter asking them to delay scheduled system maintenance so that Iranians could continue to have access.

It calls to mind a song written by Roger Waters about 17 years ago, called “Watching TV”. In it he writes of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and presents a (presumably fictional but emblematic) figure of a single protester who dies on TV. His point it that the world had changed, and his “yellow rose in her bloodstained clothes” is different from other historical figures because the massacre played itself out on television.

“And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She’s different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar half victim
She’s a victor star conceptually new
And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankanbono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She’s everybody’s sister
She’s symbolic of our failure
She’s the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on T.V.”

At the time he was right. In the past it was left to radio to penetrate the public consciousness and, of course, in the hands of a master radio can be a hugely compelling medium. And then, in the hands of the TV conglomerates, the media could begin throwing resources at the big stories and bring them to life with powerful pictures. But now, in the hands of the masses, the world of social media – Twitter, YouTube, Facebook – is even more powerful because all the barriers to entry are gone. You don’t need a broadcast studio, you don’t need a licence, borders don’t matter. All that matters is raw truth and strong content. And honesty.

The reason Twitter works is because it is brutally honest and power lies in the hands of the people. How trite that sounds, but how true it is. The big media companies are no longer setting the agenda, rather you and I are now deciding what is important and old media is being forced to follow, or render themselves irrelevant.

So while the news agenda has shifted, traditional media still has some advantages, and that rests in their access to the kind of resources that most bloggers can only dream of. And when the media display a willingness to spend those resources on the right things, the result is usually way superior to what you find in the blogosphere – certainly when it comes to deep analysis and well-researched, fact-checked stories and commentary. Also the power brokers haven’t figured out how to manage the shift to 140-character-news agendas, and a country’s President is still more likely to sit down for an in-depth interview with the BBC, CNN, New York Times or Mail & Guardian than with Joe Blogger or Josephine Tweeter. That kind of access is unmatchable and while President Obama might pay lip service to Twitter, he’s only Tweeted about 20 times since his inauguration (@BarackObama). Scrolling through his stream it’s disappointing to see that he has missed the point a bit, using the wrong tone and using it to promote the wrong things rather than putting a touch of humanity, gut reaction and personal viewpoints in it. But then he is the President of the United States with an army of people surrounding him employed specifically to carefully craft Brand Obama. So he’s not going to Tweet himself, is he (“@joebiden your fly is undone and the cameras are rolling”).

So I think Roger Waters needs to sit down and do a re-write of his classic. From Tiananmen Square to Tehran. From Watching TV to Tweeting for Real. Let the Revolution continue.

When the decision to print the paper was made, returns from the US election were coming in very slowly and time was running out before the deadline for the edition. The Tribune staff, based on the early returns, decided Dewey would be the next President. After the newspaper was delivered to the street, more returns came in and showed that Truman would be the ultimate winner and be re-elected as President. The already delivered “error” newspapers were gathered for return by staff members sent out to pick them up from newsstands and homes in the Chicago area. Not all were collected, however, and the photo of the victorious President Truman holding the paper aloft has become iconic.

While clearly no-where near as disastrous as that, I was amused this morning to find that the Weekender newspaper dated 25 April 2009 has made a similar mistake by “calling” the results of the Western Cape poll prematurely.

“DA resports to coalition for control of the Cape” says the headline, and the story goes on to say:
“Intense negotiations between political parties in the Western Cape are on the cards as they try to forge coalitions of sufficient strength to take control of the province. The horse-trading will be necessary because of the Democratic Alliance’s failure to win an outright majority in the province…”

Hmmm. Ooops. With 51.33% of the vote in her handbag, Ms Zille is now to be Premier of the Western Cape, regardless of what coalition she manages to forge. Of course she may still decide to enter into an alliance with other parties, but the point is she doesn’t have to. She has won.

I’m surprised the Weekender got it so wrong. As a Cape Town resident I have been watching the results closely for the past 36 hours. And for most of them the party hasn’t dipped below 50% at all and, when it did, it was only for a short while. If they wanted to err on the side of caution they should have printed the opposite story “Majority seems likely for the DA” would have been a more accurate, safer and, as it turned out, correct headline.

Just shows the perils of Old Media who should, in an age where there is instant news all around us, capitalise on their one biggest strength – offer great insight and detailed analysis. In a rolling news environment when a story is still live when you go to print, don’t take any chances because it gives new media pundits the chance to ridicule you and tweak your nose. Tweak tweak.

Today I’ve been working with the TV on, occasionally popping through to the lounge to see how things are progressing. While at my PC I’ve been checking a couple of websites regularly and in my car a couple of times I’ve listened to some radio news broadcasts.

All in all I have been disappointed with the way the media have handled the results release. Sure we all knew the ANC was going to win – but the other critical factors in the elections (that 2/3 majority everyone is obsessing about; the fate of the Western Cape; the overall impact of COPE; the final death throes of so many tiny parties) are all things that interest me. Having recently watched the unfolding American elections on CNN, Sky and BBC as well as online I had a fair idea of what worked for me, and had fairly high expectations that South Africa’s media would rise to the challenge.

Online was a major disappointment. IOL simply pulled their election stories into a single section of their website, but didn’t offer anything extra. Same too for the M&G (except for their, as always, ahem, exceptionally produced podcast, obviously). EWN.co.za (the online version of 702 and Cape Talk’s news) tried valiantly but have been let down by poor design that makes them look static, wordy and boring. Stick to radio guys, or call in the online experts to build the site for you. The online publication that seemed to “get” the potential of the web was The Times. A great online election section, and by pulling together news, multimedia, blogs, social media and community votes in one place, they managed to position themselves as “the only place you need to go” for election coverage – presumably the Holy Grail of the day.

The coolest feature I found online was News24′s interactive map, updated frequently throughout the day with the numbers. Easy to use and pretty effective, it became my default “numbers machine” during the day. But then it let me down. Right now it is 7:45pm, the last time the site was updated was 5:52pm. As a breaking news story with constantly shifting numbers, that just isn’t good enough, and News24 has squandered a massive opportunity. It also meant that my irritation levels were such that I can’t name them the best election site of the day despite the fact that the rest of their site was on a par with The Times – so I’ll give the Golden Lankester award (catchy, I might trademark it like that Oscar guy did) to The Times.

(And just in case Matt gives me a hard time about my News24 comments – here’s the screengrab to prove it.)

If News24 let a great opportunity slip through their fingered, the SABC didn’t even get their hands to the ball. This morning I switched the TV on around 10am wanting to get rolling results. The SABC was treating its viewers to a heady mix of Learning Channel, soapie repeats and Takalani Sesame. So much for the National Broadcaster. Fortunately the eNews channel could come to the rescue – not only on its dedicated channel but simulcast on its regular channel during the day.

The e presenters are generally pretty good. Today was the first time I’ve seen Dan Moyane on the channel. Dan is one of the nicest, most genuine and brightest guys in broadcasting, and I’ve always enjoyed him on both 702 and SAfm. But today he looked slightly uncomfortable. The peculiar seating arrangement didn’t help and at times he looked more like Debra Patta’s bodyguard than anything else.

The e coverage remained of a fairly high standard but the quality of their graphics left much to be desired. I wanted pie charts and graphs, a vote-o-meter on the left hand side of the screen throughout updating the latest figures, even when they felt it necessary to talk about weather or sport. Instead we got an occasional hard to read bar graph that didn’t offer much insight. And they perpetuated their ridiculous “have the presenters stand around” philosophy throughout, even when Jeremy and Redi came on and the difference in their height was ridiculously accentuated.

So back to the SABC it was and having dispatched the crappy daytime television and woken up to the fact thar there was in fact an election unfolding, Tim Modise appeared calm and in charge, as he always does. Even when breathless and largely amateurish field reporters went live to report on the fact that there wasn’t very much to report on. The SABC’s graphics were better than eTV’s – more readable and more useful.

Radio-wise I don’t have much to comment on because all I had to listen to was SAfm and Cape Talk. Both seemed to do ok, but as always the slickness of Cape Talk’s news operation and the intelligence and quality of their reporters put them head and shoulders above the rest.

My 2c worth – a rather incomplete overview of the media, I’m afraid, but some of us have a real job that needs to occupy some of our attention!