This past week Wikileaks caused yet another controversy by releasing cables related to the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh that suggested that Indian's ruling party had bribed lawmakers in a confidence vote over the US-India Nuclear Pact. On this issue, I checked out a number of different American and Indian news outlets and I noticed a general consistency in the news reporting although some news articles were significantly easier to understand than others. One of the best articles I came across was from India Realtime, a blog extension of the Wall Street Journal which aggregated responses from columnists from different Indian news outlets on the subject.
I wrote in my paper that Wikileaks represents a new type of news outlet in that it provides news (directly from primary sources) yet, is also a popular subject of news articles given its controversial nature. Though the Singh refuted the veracity of the Wikileaks documents, it is difficult to argue with primary-sourced information.
On another note, I've noticed that I rely on traditional news sources like the Wall Street Journal to filter through the Wikileaks documents for me instead of directly reading from the Wikileaks site. In this sense, traditional news sources are still very relevant to making information accessible and easy to understand.
-Connie
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