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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

> Leave the names of officials. Redact names your don't know

That's not as easy as it sounds. Many of the names you'd want to leave up would be of smaller generals whom you may not be familiar with. The actual shooters should perhaps also not be redacted. At least not fully.

> Newspapers seem to have managed to do this just fine for ages.

They do this by being cozy with the Pentagon and asking them exactly for what WikiLeaks has asked them for. The difference is the Pentagon's not going to ignore an email from the NYT. It did ignore WikiLeaks.

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> Many of the names you'd want to leave up would be of smaller generals whom you may not be familiar with

Investigative journalism is a difficult profession. Yet people manage. Throwing your hands up is a disservice to the profession. Calling someone who does so a journalist is a disservice to actual investigative journalists.

I did address this above but you ignored it.

You didn't. Assange found that it was difficult to be a real journalist. Instead of attempting to be responsible and do the investigative work required to figure out names that might be worth publishing, he threw up his hands and published them all

That's not investigative journalism. It's much closer to muckraking.

I know, you'd consider the likes of NYT/WaPo to be 'real journalists'.

The ones that had so cozy of a relationship with the Pentagon that they saw no problem in being government mouthpieces and getting the public to support a war in Iraq that killed 200k+ people on a made up pretense of WMDs. Same for Lybia, Syria etc.?

Because that's how you get the level of government access to be what you'd consider a 'real' journalist.

I am glad that you don't get to define who makes a 'real' journalist and who doesn't. Julian is not one of these[1] indeed.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism

> The ones that had so cozy of a relationship with the Pentagon that they saw no problem in being government mouthpieces and getting

I consider that journalistic malpractice. Like I said, investigative journalism is difficult. People, including the "real ones" sometimes do it badly. When they do, the good ones apologize and retract.

For what its worth, I don't actually think that you'd need particular government access to do a reasonable job of censoring the names of at risk agents in the documents wikileaks leaked. I'd go far enough to say that me, as a layperson, with practically no journalistic experience could do a better job than Assange did. In fact, I'm certain of that.

That's disqualifying. He didn't even try.

Assange did not allow the Pentagon to redact names. Specifically:

“...Assange wrote that WikiLeaks would consider recommendations made by the International Security Assistance Force "on the identification of innocents for this material if it is willing to provide reviewers."

That’s from your salon.com article.

So Assange would “consider” redacting (not promising anything) and only if a group from the United Nations identified “innocent” names. There’s no mention that the Pentagon has any input at all. And there’s no reason to think anyone at the ISA should know the names of undercover intelligence agents in those documents, especially the documents completely unrelated to Afghanistan... since the ISA was involved only with issues in Afghanistan.

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