By Bryan Thomson
“Even Snowden didn’t understand most of what was on his flash drive.”
In an era when hotly contested NSA leaks have sparked debates over surveillance and the effectiveness and morality of antiterrorism campaigns, journalism has a critical role. On Thursday in Filene Auditorium, Director of the Dickey Center Daniel Benjamin interviewed Steve Coll about journalism in the modern world. Coll, a contributing columnist to the New Yorker and the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, argued that journalism is going through an extreme transformation in the face of new technology, changes in policy, and massive data drops from self-proclaimed martyrs, whistleblowers and exiles like Assange and Snowden. Coll himself in researching for his books Ghost Wars, Private Empire: Exxon Mobile and American Power, and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, has experience working with ‘closed organizations,’ where data can only be obtained by “chipping away” from the outside. In researching the Bin Laden family, Coll found that the secrecy of the family and Saudi Arabian governments meant that foreign court documents were the only available windows into the family’s past. Coll’s methods of research and compilation – his firsthand experience observing the lives of Saudi Arabia’s new superrich and creation of a multigenerational tale of the Bin Ladens – exemplifies traditional journalism.
The modern world of media looks to be filled increasingly less with journalists like Coll, and more with those like Julian Assange. Organizations like Wikileaks opt to post all information, regardless of consequences. Instead of searching for patterns and investigating one item at a time, more people are prioritizing transparency over exploring questions of public interest.
Not only has the face of journalism changed, but the conditions under which the media operate have as well. Coll contends that until recently, journalism had followed a relatively static set of rules and procedures that favor anonymity and eliminate prior restraint, as were legalized by the Supreme Court in their decisions in NYT v. Sullivan (1964) and NYT v. United States (1971). Coll contends that the Obama administration and Attorney General Holder have ‘eviscerated’ freedom of the press by refusing to allow outlets to protect their sources. The largest change to the previously stable system, though, is that journalists are being asked to determine if their work contains sensitive materials. What does this responsibility mean for the future of journalism?