Editorial: Truth is not an absolute virtue

The English press baron, Lord Northcliffe, famously defined news as "what somebody somewhere wants to suppress". And nobody could seriously argue that the world is not a better place as a result of the Washington Post's scrutiny of the Nixon White House, Fortune magazine's exposure of Enron or Seymour Hersh's reports of atrocities at My Lai and Abu Ghraib.

So any journalist might be expected to applaud the decision by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks to publish thousands of diplomatic cables from and between US embassies around the world.

But absoluteness is, by definition, problematic. And absolute freedom of information is not an absolute virtue. Britain's Guardian newspaper, one of the chosen conduits for the drip-feed of cyber-revelations, has predictably hailed the event as "a triumph for data journalism" - a telling neologism since it implicitly defines simply pouring raw information into the public domain as legitimate journalistic practice.

But such a phrase begs the central question of this affair: is information made public by definition better than information kept secret?

Wikileaks began this week to publish more than 250,000 documents in daily digests. This drip-feed policy in itself suggests its aims are, at least in part, punitive rather than noble. It is "death by a thousand cuts", which will put governments in damage control for months when, to put it mildly, there is enough going on in the world to keep them busy.

But the questions of strategy are minor when compared to the substantive issue of the indiscriminate leaking. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described the leaks as an attack "not just ... on America's foreign policy [but also] on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity." Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange replied that "of course, abusive, titanic organisations, when exposed, grasp at all sorts of ridiculous straws to try and distract the public from the true nature of the abuse." Neither stance is wholly right, since neither takes the nuanced view that the issue demands.

It is unquestionable that there are matters to do with, say, the conduct of the war in Iraq that require public scrutiny, in particular since President George W Bush presumed to be acting on behalf of the free world when he launched the US-led invasion. On that basis the release of the infamous Apache helicopter footage was hard to fault. But much of what is coming out in the diplomatic cables suggest that Assange has trouble with the distinction between the public interest and what might interest the public.

The US ambassador to Italy's reports that Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi's inclination for loose living compromised his political effectiveness is scarcely front-page news; nor that Prince Andrew, who huffed and puffed about the quality of British geography teachers, is pompous and overbearing. Such revelations smack more of prurience than prudence.

More disturbing was the cable that quoted Saudi King Abdullah as saying, in reference to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the US should "cut off the head of the snake". Middle East affairs are volatile enough without robbing leaders of the ability to communicate frankly and confidentially with each other.

To the overarching question - should governments do business only in public - the answer is plainly no. And ironically, the leaks seem certain to prompt a drastic reduction in the number of people who will have access to such cable traffic in the future. Secrecy will be stepped up, not dismantled, as a result of Wikileaks' activities.

Assange, who has shown a pronounced distaste for discussing the implications of his work or submitting to the same standards of transparency he demands of others, might like to explain which - his disclosures or the resultant clampdown - better serves democracy. He can't have it both ways.