The world stands transfixed by the reams of documents supposedly "leaked" by computer hackers.
How is it a leak, however, when the world's aware of the facts already?
Did we really need WikiLeaks to tell us that the Vatican is incapable of communicating with the faithful? If you're Catholic, you've been aware of that fact since the day you were baptized.
How about the brilliant observation that the hierarchy are (shocker) all men, and (further shock) they're seventy years of age or more. Would you expect your grandfather to be Twittering away and updating his Facebook page?
No one is startled to learn via WikiLeaks that the Irish Government treated the Vatican with kid gloves when it came time to investigate child sexual abuse by the clergy. A sensible individual reading news reports at the time could see plainly that the State was far from aggressive in its investigation. The cozy relationship between Church and State was at the heart of the crisis, and it didn't take an official document to verify what is painfully obvious.
That's the funny thing about the purloined cables and secret documents. By and large, they don't contain news but observations by embassy personnel that reflect opinions and observations you could have picked up by reading newspapers. Nothing particularly shocking or earth shattering has come out.
If a tree falls in a forest, is there sound? If a document that repeats what was said already is released with a great deal of hype, is it news, or just a re-run of an old program?
2 comments:
Great post! I linked to it on my blog. After everybody finally realizes that there is no real value to those leaks, we will be able to start analyzing why there's been so much hype surrounding this old and stale information.
I blame it on the 24/7 news cycle. It's a lot of time to fill and if one network is covering a story, the other has to cover it with greater passion, and so it escalates.
Now that we the audience are seeing that the emperor is indeed in the nip, the story will die a natural death.
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