http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2010/12/07/wikileaks-cablegate/
The Cable Gate leaks have been of a different order to the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs. Not in number (there were 90,000 documents in the Afghanistan war logs and over 390,000 in the Iraq logs; the Cable Gate documents number around 250,000) – but in subject matter.
Why is it that the 15,000 extra civilian deaths estimated to have been revealed by the Iraq war logs did not move the US authorities to shut down Wikileaks’ hosting and PayPal accounts? Why did it not dominate the news agenda in quite the same way?
Tragedy or statistic?
Generally misattributed to Stalin, the quote “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” illustrates the problem particularly well: when you move beyond scales we can deal with on a human level, you struggle to engage people in the issue you are covering.
Research suggests this is a problem that not only affects journalism, but justice as well. In October Ben Goldacre wrote about a study that suggested “People who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm a smaller number. Courts punish people less harshly when they harm more people.”
Is it an Inability or just Unwillingness to apply themselves to questions of scale and proportion that infects Modern Culture? Not that it's ever been any different, but at least now most citizens of industrialized countries have the possibility to access actual data and not simply hear distant anecdotes about far off places and events.
It almost seems as though it's a Culture in Hiding.
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