Another Reason Journolist Was a Bad Idea

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Media Behaving Badly |

Journolist was a terrible idea from the start, not so much because it enabled the promotion of “lock-steppedness” and a progressive party line across media organizations (though Salam more or less concedes that it did), or because it fostered an “us vs. them” mentality (which it also obviously did). It was a bad idea, mainly because it took a process that could have been public, democratic and transparent and gratuitously made it private, stratified and opaque. This was an odd move for “progressives” to make when confronted with the revolutionary openness of the Web. It’s as if they’d looked at our great national parks and said hey, what we really need is to carve out a private walled enclave for the well connected. Invited to a terrific party, they immediately set up a VIP room.

There are lots of reasons why Journolist’s veiled nature was a bad idea, but here’s one you won’t hear about - information exchanged and processed in secret tends to be incomplete, untested by vigorous cross-examination, vulnerable to manipulation by individual agendas, and therefore ultimately low in value and credibility.

Kaus’s comments reminded me of this Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece on Operation Mincemeat, a WWII British spy operation that fed the Germans false information about Allied invasion plans.

These are two fine examples of why the proprietary kind of information that spies purvey is so much riskier than the products of rational analysis. Rational inferences can be debated openly and widely. Secrets belong to a small assortment of individuals, and inevitably become hostage to private agendas. Kühlenthal was an advocate of the documents because he needed them to be true; von Roenne was an advocate of the documents because he suspected them to be false. In neither case did the audiences for their assessments have an inkling about their private motivations. As Harold Wilensky wrote in his classic work “Organizational Intelligence” (1967), “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” Wilensky had the Bay of Pigs debacle in mind when he wrote that. But it could just as easily have applied to any number of instances since, including the private channels of “intelligence” used by members of the Bush Administration to convince themselves that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Previously - Absence of Evidence Actually *is* Evidence of Absence

Tags: journolist