Most people in the Western world already know of the Wikileaks Cablegate and it's intrepid founder, Mr. Julian Assange and his recent legal troubles. Government enemy No. 1, he's either hated for shining light on the dark, shadowy recesses of authority or hailed as a champion for free speech and the rights of citizens to keep their governments in check.
Like him or not, he and his cohorts have swung an almighty hammer that's left a noticeable and almost unrepairable crack in the facade of international relations and politics. We are reminded once again that governments are in the service of its citizens and not the other way around.
But one element of the defense for his activities is insistence that his brand of iconoclastic reporting is to be called "scientific journalism," as he writes in the Australian:
To me, as a student of General Semantics and a media professional, linking a primary document as a source of a story isn't really scientific, it's also sort of lazy. It's like using one map against another map of the territory to assess which one is more a true-to-fact re-presentation of territory. At the core of it, scientific journalism has its limits much in the same way new media or citizen journalism does as well as the entire debate surrounding "objectivity", ethics, etc.WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
If all media outlets adopt scientific journalism then they will also lose the human element in the process. Not every story can be reported via scientific journalism and it would be folly to call for every media producer to do so.
I also believe he misuses the word "scientific" in lieu of the more accurate "evidence-based and cross-verifiable." Science (or rather the scientific method) requires a hypothesis to be tested which is then either refuted or confirmed by the observed results. The nature of human reporting does not bode well for writing stories based on "science." Stories are not experiments to be replicated by other scientific practitioners. The "event" happens only once; we can only infer sense data after the fact. Stories are a medium to convey information from one person to a mass and will contain inaccuracies much like our language which involves a complicated abstraction process.
If our sources are people - witnesses, insiders, etc., we tend to gather information from their impressions - the byproducts of their semantic reactors. How do we know that what they know is accurate and so on into infinite regress.
I am all for an ethical, accurate press and free, open and limited government and I applaud Mr. Assange for his desire (and to a lesser extent, his methods) to tip the balance of power from bureaucratic government toward the people; those who pick up their tab and legitimize its authority. But as for "scientific journalism" Mr. Assange? Stick to what you know - but don't give up.