Recent comments by tg

ALEXA O’BRIEN: The judge ruled that his speedy trial rights had not been violated.
What’s so interesting about the Manning case, in context with the federal investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, a media organization in the digital age, as well as the sort of socioeconomic changes that have been happening with essentially the maturation of the game generation or the digital generation, you know, vis-à-vis the boomers, is the fact that in many regards this trial encompasses a joining together of all the major issues of our age in the post-9/11 world. For example, the entire interagency process has been zeroed in on this young soldier and the WikiLeaks organization in probably one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history, and yet the press hasn’t been covering it.
HARRY SHEARER: Before we get into the details of the pretrial proceedings, one more question about that. As you sit there day after day working your way through these proceedings and creating these transcripts, what’s your best guess as to why the rest of the press isn’t covering this?
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I think this has multiple layers to it. I think on one sense, if we look at it purely from the bottom-line perspective, is that WikiLeaks represents a challenge to the market power that the mainstream media organizations have over audiences. And of course you know it costs a lot of money up-front to produce news and especially investigative journalism and entertainment. It costs relatively little in the digital age to distribute it. And so therefore control of audiences is very, very important as these media organizations enter this new era. So I think that they’ve taken a defensive posture towards WikiLeaks because of that fundamentally, and I think also it’s a question of access to information. I mean, WikiLeaks, the reason why it’s so revolutionary is that it allows the janitor to leak and not simply the high-level Obama administration authorized leak to, you know, Bob Woodward, so to speak, to sell war or a particular political agenda of the elites. So there’s a lot going on here that is reason for them not to cover it.

Transcript: Alexa O’Brien Interview - Harry Shearer