The new accountability

Given the cultural ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter in the media and in our daily lives, it's easy to forget that there is a darker side to the web. The publication last week by whistleblower site Wikileaks of 400,000 classified documents relating to the conduct of the war in Iraq has reignited a furious debate about how policymakers, press and public interact in the age of the internet.

The documents, passed to Wikileaks by an American serviceman, are largely mundane but include revelations about a catologue of misconduct by both coalition forces and their Iraqi allies. In some cases, they refer to incidents best described as war crimes.

Few among our readership are old enough to remember the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, perhaps journalism's greatest ever triumph. But the Iraq War Logs, and other leaks like them, may prove to be as significant for our generation as Woodward and Bernstein's work was in the early 1970s. The Iraq War was certainly a watershed event in our times, and the electronic lens through which revelations about that bloody, costly, controversial war is a fitting mark of how our relationship with the world and those in power has changed.

Wikileaks is an interesting proposal. The concept is sound: allowing the passage of secret documents of public interest securely and anonymously into the public domain. But the fact that the Wikileaks poster-boy Bradley Manning – the American soldier who leaked the Collateral Murder video that made the site's name – is now rotting in a military prison undermines their methodology to a certain extent. Wikileaks' claim of impartiality has not yet been discredited, but they have betrayed a certain partisanship in giving preferential access to publications of a liberal persuasion. The risk of Wikileaks editorialising in their use and publication of data should make us wary. Some claim 'data journalism' as the spiritual successor to traditional pen-and-paper investigative reporting, but if this is to be the model of the new accountability, we need to see less curation in what they publish.