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4 October 2011 Assessing WikiLeaks' Impact Upon Central Asian Journalism
From: Christopher Schwartz <schwartz[at]neweurasia.net> Hi everyone, The latest issue of the Global Media Journal - Australian Edition has been published, and it includes my academic essay, "'If they’re collecting all of this information, they’re surely using it, right?' WikiLeaks' impact on post-Soviet Central Asia", which explores the impact of Cablegate upon the Central Asian journalism community: http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/gmjau/v5_2011_1/schwartz_Essay.html [Note: there is a pdf version available in the upper right hand corner, but its formatting isn't great and only the html version has hyperlinks]. The essay is based primarily upon conversations with Western and Central Asian journalists and academics working in or about the region. As indicated in the following excerpt, it's a critical piece: "Here’s what I see so far: despite some intriguing remarks about the former Soviet Union circulated internally within the organisation, Julian Assange and company have not been handling Central Asia very well, at least not yet. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as far as I and other journalists can see, the cables have had almost zero effect on either audiences or the media; in Tajikistan, it’s re-ignited old anger toward the Russians and called into question the purported mission of the whistleblowing entity; and in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, it appears to have possibly had one of Assange’s desired effects – frightening the hell out of the secretive ruling elite – but possibly at a subtle, hard-to-measure cost to civil society activists and human rights defenders who must live the hard day-to-day realities under renewed governmental fears of an American digital panopticon. At stake here is whether WikiLeaks has actually contributed to the marginalisation of the region, both internally and globally, or whether it has presented a unique opportunity to counter that process; this essay is an attempt, however brief, to try ascertaining which." --
Christopher Schwartz
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