Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to BenWilson,
How about if the equivalent in Zimbabwe or Burma, or Fiji is doing the paying?
The journalist or MP concerned needs to declare the source and deal with the consequences of that themselves. Visits courtesy of dictatorships won’t be acceptable and won’t be taken – although back in the day journalists and budding leaders used to accept travel grants from the Soviet Union.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I might limit myself to asking you what I asked Keir. Can you look back on the history of the WikiLeaks releases and say ‘on balance I wish we didn’t know that?’
Wesley Snipes’ tax records come to mind, and the irrelevant release of sorority rituals.
But I’m clearly not talking about the real stories, but the way everything seems to be framed as a consequence of being presented by Wikileaks.
Thus, a venerable and very public cultural exchange programme gets reframed as spy vs spy. Because it must be a conspiracy, right?
The problem here is that it damages real people who have done nothing wrong. It’s so easy to just pile another conspiracy on top of the last one. Ask Ali Ikram how he’s feeling about the Star Times story. Stitched up is the answer.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I don’t know. I think it complicates things, at the very minimum. Why does the State Department even offer? What’s in it for them?
I think the above answers that. There's certainly a good discussion to be had about media resourcing, given that most journalists' working and study travel outside New Zealand is conducted on some sort of external funding.
But suddenly deciding that a longstanding public exchange programme is some secret spy business is a symptom of what irks me about the paranoid culture fostered by Wikileaks.
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In the interest of finding out the basic information rather than yet more muttering in a conspiratorial fashion, here’s some on the International Visitor Program, which has operated for the past 60 years under authority of the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961 (Fulbright-Hays Act) and is administered by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs.
It’s aligned with the International Visitor Leadership Program, in which Helen Clark, David Lange, Bill Rowling and Norm Kirk all participated at different times in their careers.
They’re overseen by the National Council for International Visitors, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization established in 1961 to promote excellence in citizen diplomacy.”
The IVLP’s two long-term goals are cited by the council as:
1. Link the foreign leaders with their U.S. counterparts, providing a solid professional experience and in-depth, substantive exploration of key issues and diverse, balanced approaches to these issues.
2. Enable the visitors to gain a better understanding of the history and heritage of the United States, a better sense of who [Americans] are as a people and what [Americans] value.
None of this is a secret, and none of it has been a secret for six bloody decades.
But of course, it was in a Wikileaked cable so it must be a scandal.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Other companies embassies (mostly Germany and China) sponsor similar trips, as do their tourism organisations.
As does Tourism NZ.
For that matter, Keith, Graham, Hadyn and I have travelled with the assistance of the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
It is still annoying that the press gets to act as a public filter. I suspect the SST’s interests are not many of ours. For example, I would like to see the 9 cables on IT, the cables about “Trade and Technology Controls” and the cables about trade agreements.
We got what seemed newsworthy to Nicky Hager, which is fair enough. There are a quarter of a million cables, so not everything can be processed at once. You could try contacting either him or Wikileaks directly to expedite release of the cables you want.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Public Servant on a tea-break.,
You are talking this down, but remember this aspect of the story is really the only one we didn’t already know.
Thing is, we very probably did. As Danyl notes, his partner included a declaration with her stories and I strongly suspect the others did the same. I'd be disappointed and puzzled if they did not.
It's basically because their names appear in the context of a Wikileaks cable that it suddenly seems there's a conspiracy.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Public Servant on a tea-break.,
So, no reporting from TVNZ or 3 News then. I would be surprised if it turns up on Nine to Noon either.
The more interesting one would be whether any Sunday Star Times journalists have participated in the scheme. We should probably know that, in the circumstances.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
That’s pretty silly. My wife went on one of those trips earlier this year: the only ‘subversion’ is that she attributed the State Dept (‘This trip was made possible . . .’) at the bottom of all the stories she filed.
Quite. I think it was Tim Hannah who observed upthread that Wikileaks/Assange’s style has the effect of “amplifying the conspiratorial nature of government”. The idea that the journalists were per se “involved” in something bad is distinctly faulty.
The NZ Wikileaks cables released so far (9/1490) aren’t mind-blowing, but you can’t pretend they’re not of historic value in documenting the changing relationship between NZ and the US.
Agreed.
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Just for purposes of disclosure, I do get a little something from this too.
Meet my new favourite dram: the Adelphi Fascadale 10 year-old, which comes from a certain island where there is but one distillery ...
I'm such an Adelphi fanboi. It's nice to have another one I can reasonably afford.