After 30 years of making the world a happier place, Apple co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs died yesterday, age 56. The world mourns the man some have called the Edison of our time.
People around the world took to social networks yesterday to express their condolences. Bill Gates tweeted: “I will miss Steve immensely”. Tony Hawk said: “Steve Jobs was the man”. Barack Obama’s statement, “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” got retweet after retweet.
While this was happening, Wikileaks was also tweeting about Steve Jobs. Except in doing so, the organisation was committing a journalistic crime taken straight from the playbook of the News of the World. You wouldn’t even read what they published on TMZ.
Wikileaks tweeted a link that contained what they said was “purported” to be “Steve Jobs medical records”. (After a torrent of criticism, Wikileaks denied they had published Jobs’ medical records yesterday - which is just semantics). The records they placed on their website made allegations about Jobs’ medical condition, even though the Wikileaks website said there was a strong chance they were fabricated and shouldn’t be taken at face value.
There are two issues with this. First, Wikileaks published - to all intents and purposes - the private medical records of a man who had just died. A man who would have wanted his records kept private, whatever they contained.
The public had no real need to know why he was sick. We didn’t and don’t need to know the specific details.
Second, the allegations in the documents were extremely likely to be totally inaccurate. I’m not going to publish what the documents alleged. It was an inaccurate smear of a dead man that could cause distress to Jobs’ family. It had all the credibility of a chain email. And they were published by an organisation that refers to themselves as “journalists”.
This raises a bunch of questions. Like: How is this any different to what some newspapers in the UK did when they threatened to publish the medical records of former PM Gordon Brown’s ill four-month-old boy? Are the basics much different to what News of the World journalists did when they were hacking away at the phone of a murdered schoolgirl?
I posed these questions yesterday to someone who’s studied the media ethics debate extensively: Dr Richard Phillipps, a research fellow with the School of Communication and Media at Bond University.
“I think in some ways this is worse, because in the [schoolgirl] case they were damaging what was a police investigation,” Dr Phillipps says, “But in this case there really isn’t a justifiable interest in the public knowing about this.”
Dr Phillipps says there are sometimes circumstances where medical records should be published. John F. Kennedy concealed from the public that he was suffering from a litany of serious health problems – something Americans might have liked to know about the man who stared down the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Steve Jobs wasn’t JFK. He was a private citizen.
“There might be the occasional very rare circumstance this might be justified but in my mind medical records should be between the doctor and the hospital,” says Dr Phillipps.
“I don’t see how they can get any credibility out of this. Most people would be sick of this sort of behaviour.”
Sure, Wikileaks has done some good things for journalism. They blew the lid on the US military murdering innocent cameramen in Iraq. Newspapers, from The New York Times to The Guardian to The Sydney Morning Herald have used Wikileaks’ release of State Department cables to break stories about what our governments haven’t been telling us.
Dr Phillipps says: “Some of the stuff they publish has had some good benefits. Governments have been trying to conceal some certain information and it’s important they come out eventually.”
But as well as doing some horrific things, even the News of the World did some good things for journalism – like blowing the lid on an international cricketing betting scandal. That doesn’t absolve it from its sins, though.
People care when reporters forget their humanity for the sake of a scoop. That poisons the well between readers and journalists. That’s why the News of the World no longer exists.
Late last year, Julian Assange published an op-ed in The Australian. Assange said Wikileaks was responsible for “scientific journalism”.
“Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on,” he writes. “Then you can judge yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?”
But why aren’t Wikileaks asking themselves the question: “Is this the right thing to do?”
Some News of the World reporters forgot about what was right and wrong. But it seems strange that Wikileaks – a group of people who never fail to lecture others from atop their moral high horse – forgot about it too.
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