The Afghan War leaks don’t tell us The Truth

This article was published in Spiked-Online 27 July 2010

Journalists’ increasing reliance on leaks is turning them into passive recipients of information rather than active seekers of truth.

So we finally know the truth about the Afghan War, do we, courtesy of the 90,000 leaked military documents simultaneously revealed by the UK Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel? Rubbish. Truth is not something that is handed to us on a silver platter by know-it-all whistleblowers. It is something we discover for ourselves through a process of critical investigation and by quizzing and querying received wisdoms. The media’s pant-wetting excitement about these leaked documents only shows what a parlous state journalism is in, and how much journalists have become the passive recipients of information rather than active seekers of the truth.

The 90,000 American military records, covering everything from the deaths of Afghan civilians to the possible involvement of Pakistan and Iran in sponsoring the Taliban, were given to, and then published by, the leak-loving website Wikileaks. The site gave advance access to the records to the Guardian, the NYT and Der Spiegel.