Wikileaks versus the print media

The Times asks, if Daniel Ellsberg were to leak "The Pentagon Papers" today, would he go to The Times and The Post, as he did in 1972, or dump the entire document on a site like Wikileaks?

Two weeks ago, Wikileaks.org released a classified video showing a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad. The reaction was so swift and powerful — an edited version has been viewed six million times on YouTube — that the episode provoked many questions about how such material is now released and digested.

Put another way: if someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately?

Mr. Ellsberg knows his answer.

“As of today, I wouldn’t have waited that long,” he said in an interview last week. “I would have gotten a scanner and put them on the Internet.”

In early 1971, Mr. Ellsberg, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, passed a New York Times reporter a copy of a top-secret report casting doubt on the war in Vietnam, the so-called Pentagon Papers. For months, he said, he waited, unsure if The New York Times would ever publish.

When the Nixon administration went to court and prevented The Times from publishing the full report, Mr. Ellsberg gave copies to The Washington Post and other newspapers.

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Today, he says, there is something enticing about being independent — not at the whim of publishers or government attempts to control release. “The government wouldn’t have been tempted to enjoin it, if I had put it all out at once,” he said. “We got this duel going between newspapers and the government.”

He does concede that something might have been lost had Wikileaks been around in 1971. “I don’t think it would have had the same impact, then or now, as having it in The Times,” he said. The government’s attempt to block publication — something ended by the Supreme Court — was the best publicity, he said.

I think that's right. The Wikileaks video led to a great deal of -- brief -- interest, but it was pretty confined. It got more attention than it might otherwise had because of the angry response by Gates. I was a kid in '72 and I can remember how much attention Ellsberg's leak received.

But more than that, "The Pentagon Papers" is multi-volumed and several hundred pages long. In the months that the papers waited to resolve the court cases, they had time to analyze the document and summarize its contents for their readers, likely by military and Pentagon reporters, upon its release. A document dump now -- all due respect to citizen journalists everywhere -- would require time for people to read it and post their interpretations. A document uploaded directly to The Tubes may seem like it would have more immediate impact, but I think the slow drizzle of blog posts, over months, not days, would have lessened its impact considerably.