Wikileaks have a problem: their site will wither and die if no-one picks up their stories and links to it.
New Statesman - or rather, their libel insurer - has a different problem: excessive timidity bordering on cowardice. Admittedly, they aren't caving in under threats directed against their own reporting (I hope that they stand by their own reporters and their own stories, but I do wonder) and it's not entirely reasonable to take a stance over something that wasn't written by their own reporters, looked over by an editor and fact-checked...
But that's exactly what you'd do next when a powerful man attempts to suppress it! Any editor worth his salt knows that this is a story worth picking up, because the very definition of 'news' is that someone wants to stop you reporting it.
Of course, it may well be that the Editor of the New Statesman has weighed the odds and recognised that the current state of libel law is an effective censor, he has no hope of fighting it, and he's not going to be the next fool to land his paper with a million-pound bill for damages by reporting (say) that Robert Maxwell is a crook who's robbed his own pensioners. Such fabrications and irresponsibility are fatal to entire publications as well as to editorial careers.
You've made my point for me - and far more eloquently than I did!
If any party to this is coming out with its reputation damaged, it's The New Statesman, not Wikileaks. For the latter to sue the former for libel is, well, almost comical.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-11-17 02:31 pm (UTC)Wikileaks have a problem: their site will wither and die if no-one picks up their stories and links to it.
New Statesman - or rather, their libel insurer - has a different problem: excessive timidity bordering on cowardice. Admittedly, they aren't caving in under threats directed against their own reporting (I hope that they stand by their own reporters and their own stories, but I do wonder) and it's not entirely reasonable to take a stance over something that wasn't written by their own reporters, looked over by an editor and fact-checked...
But that's exactly what you'd do next when a powerful man attempts to suppress it! Any editor worth his salt knows that this is a story worth picking up, because the very definition of 'news' is that someone wants to stop you reporting it.
Of course, it may well be that the Editor of the New Statesman has weighed the odds and recognised that the current state of libel law is an effective censor, he has no hope of fighting it, and he's not going to be the next fool to land his paper with a million-pound bill for damages by reporting (say) that Robert Maxwell is a crook who's robbed his own pensioners. Such fabrications and irresponsibility are fatal to entire publications as well as to editorial careers.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-17 08:11 pm (UTC)If any party to this is coming out with its reputation damaged, it's The New Statesman, not Wikileaks. For the latter to sue the former for libel is, well, almost comical.