Information Is Never Neutral: The Editor Of Wikileaks Breaks His Silence

“If you’re not a radical journalist, you’re not a journalist,” Kristinn tells us near the beginning of our interview. “You’re basically part of the problem. You’re in PR. Not to say that these reporters are necessarily being paid directly by the powers that be; they could also be avoiding conflict or shielding themselves from criticism. It can be difficult to take on power, and some people are just averse to conflict.”

Kristinn is not one of these people. His entire journalistic career, from his early days at public broadcasting to his current job managing Wikileaks, is a reflection of this notion that journalism is about speaking truth to power. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he cites his early influences as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke the Watergate story based on material leaked to them by a whistleblower, along with films such as ‘All The President’s Men’ and ‘China Syndrome’. “Films that depict journalists as a force for good in society.”

As the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Kristinn certainly has his plate full. Chelsea Manning’s re-arrest, the Cohen testimony, the Mueller investigation as a whole—all of these things involve Wikileaks in some fashion or another, justifiably or not. No matter what Kristinn has to deal with, his convictions on the role of Wikileaks and journalism in general remain strong.

What brought Kristinn from freelancing in his early days to the role he plays today? Why is Wikileaks still important? In the age of clickbait and “fake news,” what is the future of journalism? Most of all, how can the average person know what media to trust?

From Kompás to crash

Kristinn’s journalism career began in the 80s, doing what most people do when they start out in the business: freelancing. He would land a job at Iceland’s public broadcasting network, RÚV, in 1991; a time when there was plenty to report, both at home and abroad. Even in his early days, Kristinn had very clear ideas about what a reporter’s job should be.

“I felt that journalism had to be ethical, but tough,” he tells us. “The ideals that I followed at the time would probably be considered radical today. The accusation that journalism should be neutral in some way was a bit absent at the time. Being a journalist in Iceland for 20 years, I’ve gotten accusations of bias from all sides. As I was telling a friend the other day, when you’ve had people shouting at you from all corners of the political spectrum then you’re probably doing your job right.

“When you’ve had people shouting at you from all corners of the political spectrum then you’re probably doing your job right.”

“You become inoculated to that kind of criticism. You have to commit yourself to certain ideals if you want the privilege of the job.”

Kristinn would get his chance to put those ideals into action in a major way when he joined the team of Kompás, a first-of-its-kind for Iceland investigative news programme. Working with a small staff and constricted budget, Kristinn describes his time there as “a lot of work but very gratifying.”

The financial crash of 2008 would end up being a major turning point for Kristinn. Amongst the findings of the Special Investigative Commission, a body charged with examining the causes of the crash, was a fairly damning assessment of how the Icelandic media had been complicit in its silence, and its blind faith in financial actors to tell reporters the truth. It’s an assessment Kristinn agrees with wholeheartedly.

“In general, I think we as journalists had a lot to answer for. I said so, publicly,” he says, referring to an Icelandic Journalist Union meeting about a month after the crash. “I was quite critical of myself and my colleagues, for breaching the trust that was granted to us by the general public. We trusted all financial matters to dedicated financial journalists, who were often in bed with the bankers; pundits of the elite. The rest of us thought financial matters were too complicated and required specialisation. We bought into the story of these wizards who created wealth out of nothing; these modern day alchemists in the banking sector. We didn’t see through the smokescreen. That’s a failure. We ignored the warning signals, like many others. We as journalists had a lot of soul searching to do.”

This is an excerpt of a feature published by The Reykjavík Grapevine. You can read the whole feature here.

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