Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks’ huge trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war.
For one thing — and this supports Exum’s argument — many, if not most, of these documents are frontline reports.
And some of the heavy-breathing accounts surrounding the documents don’t really match what the logs say. “Taliban sympathisers listening in to top-secret phone calls of US-led coalition,” pants the Guardian.
That both clarifies the focus of individual reports and limits the degree to which any analyst can responsibly extrapolate them into clear trends.
here’s a bias in journalism toward believing that what’s secret is inherently a hive of hidden truth. That operating principle animates reporters’ practice of breaking down governmental secrecy. But it can also create a misleading expectation that leaks represent huge new revelations.
Whether they add up to more than the sum of their parts is a judgment.
There's a bias in journalism toward believing that what's secret is inherently a hive of hidden truth,which can create a misleading expectation that leaks represent huge new revelations.
When these don't manifest, it creates an expectation that the trove is neither useful nor significant. In this case, that would be a mistake.