Relying on fifth-hand info in Anwar leak
By uppercaise
Here’s a reality check on the WikiLeak about Anwar Ibrahim: people are reacting to almost fifth-hand reporting, based on what someone told someone who told someone who then wrote it down in a cable.
So far, that’s all we have to go on, and that’s all that was reported. Without the full text of the cable to place the remarks in context, it’s difficult to resist a tentative conclusion that what we’ve seen and read so far makes it look, sound, and smell like a smear job.
With news reports, blog and Twitter comments full of sound and fury since yesterday, it can be forgotten that the commotion is based on a news report about remarks made by other people, but not on any actual reports that those people may have made.
An Australian newspaper said that an American diplomat had said that he heard Singaporean diplomats say that the Australians had said that…
Extreme hearsay, you might say.
The Sun-Herald, which reported exclusively on the cable, has not released the text, and neither has WikiLeaks. Until then, everything is based on third-hand assessments of what might have been said.
Singapore’s foreign minister George Yeo took a similar line.
Any communication must not be taken out of context. There will be more coming out in the future and ‘you said this about me and I said this about you’ and it goes on. That is what certain individuals said about others. There could be a diversity of views. As I said, they probably said things about me which I may not agree with. But that is fine, that is to be expected. If you want to hear everything which others say behind your back, and take offence at it, you will be a very unhappy person. Sometimes it was in the nature of “cocktail talk” . People say things in a blunt forthright way, and we should not divorce, even if true, what is said from the context.
Well, George is trying to be very casual, to play down the significance of what was reportedly said in the cable, on the lines that it’s just coffeeshop talk.
