Comment by awacs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awacs | Hacker News Reader

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I concur with this view. I don't necessarily think the Wikileaks are not valid, but from my point of view, Wikileaks lost all credibility being 100% anti-Hillary, with zero anti-Trump information released. Somehow I don't think the RNC would have much different internal e-mails floating around at this point.

That being said, I read the Goldman transcripts and other things that were supposed to be so damaging, and they really weren't that bad, beyond any other typical politician. Is she corrupt, absolutely. Is there a giant media conspiracy (now including SNL) against Trump? Ridiculous. He makes his own wounds.

In addition, even Mike Pence has now admitted Russia is disseminating information to Wikileaks. So we have a clear connection between Russia / Putin and Trump. I don't believe it's as far as many think with them working together, but clearly someone as thin skinned and easily manipulated as Trump would be a total win for Putin. We can talk about Hillary's collusion, Clinton Foundation corruptness and such, but how the Putin pro Trump position is not as relevant is beyond me, if not the deal breaker considering the state of Russia / American current affairs.

I don't think it's entirely fair to blame this imbalance on Wikileaks; they may not have received any information derogatory to the Trump campaign.

Wikileaks' current agenda appears to be to disrupt Western governments through leaking damaging information. I don't see a clear preference for political parties; the Manning leaks were damaging to the Republican Bush administration.

I believe that the most probable source of the DNC leaks is Russian government units, but not for the purposes of election manipulation. Here is an article that most credibly posits this theory: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-spycraft-how-kre....

While I'm not sure you can entirely fault Wikileaks for the material they receive, I do believe I can fault them for their release policy. I'm not sure of any reason to dole out the leaks slowly over time, leading up to the election. All that does is reduce the time available to get useful information, context and verification about the leaked data. That seems less about journalism informing the public, and more about an activist attempting to influence the public.

I had mixed feeling about Wikileaks before (as I think anyone should, since it's a very complex topic), but any thoughts I had as to him be impartial in any way (as a good journalist should be) are now out the window.

That's an excellent point that I had not considered. The doling out of emails over time, segmenting them into topics (should a leak be editorialized?) and offering up what are essentially promotional teases for more data ... that does seem to move the needle away from "journalists educating the electorate" to "politically motivated guy with a chip on his shoulder".

Honestly, Assange shouldn't have been the face behind the leaks. It should've been the agency's "face", and it should've been dumped all at once, like most of their past releases.

That's a pretty bad strategy though. Even if you were tweeting coupons for your store you'd want to space the tweets out to get more attention.

Also, think of the political dynamic. There isn't much difference between one huge scandal and ten - there's still only so much airtime. Anything leaked as a unit can be responded to as a unit.

Anyone could anonymously create a torrent and paste it in some related thread, the important thing, and why people go to Wikileaks, is getting it read faster than "they" can delete it.

Absolutely Assange has had an anti-Hillary slant; I don't consider Wikileaks and Assange to be the same. Maybe I should (?). I guess I give leaders to have the latitude to have opinions that don't represent their organizations.

One look at Assange's Twitter is all it takes to see the obvious anti-Hillary bias. The shrill "Hillary's got an earpiece!" post is one of the most glaring examples.

Assange is anti-power, and likely feels Trump is not a serious challenger, so there is more to be won from hurting Clinton. It's not really an anti-Hillary bias.

Wikileaks has over 800k Russian documents that Putin was not happy about getting leaked.

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Whistleblowers/Russia

Is there anything there that's newer than a decade ago? Or did my quick perusal miss some more recent dates?

Perhaps you can provide more info on exactly what documents you think Putin is not happy about?

Two comments up I state that I don't equate Wikileaks and Assange. I defended Wikileaks in the comment.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have seen zero information leaked during this election that didn't have an anti-Hillary agenda, content discussion and validity aside. If there is anything critical of Trump, please share. With that being the case, it's clearly beyond a disruption agenda, and a pro-Trump agenda. Again, maybe I just haven't seen anything anti-Trump, but I've looked and found nothing.

Wikileaks and the Russian-state-linked DCLeaks may have zero anti-Trump documents, but the 1995 Trump tax return and the surreptitiously-recorded sexual assault boast tape are examples of leaks exposed in this campaign. I believe the anti-Trump leaks have had significantly more impact than the anti-Hillary leaks so far.

Seth Rich was implied to be the DNC leak. He was a DNC operative who was "robbed" and subsequently murdered. Still unsolved. There is 0 evidence of Russia being the only entity who gained access.

There are multiple access points, some within Federal Government.

The RNC was fairly openly anti-Trump during the primaries, there won't be any evidence of them cheating on his behalf.

Also there's no real need to take anti-Trump info to Wikileaks. The NYT was willing to publish one of Trump's tax returns from the 90s and those are legally protected. You can take anti-trump documents to any major newspaper.

There is an angle on every Trump story, because there have to be an angle - journalism is about angles. There is no reporting of mere facts.

The current angle is that Trump is a bad guy, and you just have to look at the photos of him to get the angle - 99% of him making a weird face.

It does not make the story false, but there is an angle.

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