Mediastan, A Wikileaks Road Movie

This is a very interesting film from 2013 tracing the efforts of journalists acting as WikiLeaks helpers getting the leaked American Diplomatic Cables published in various countries in Central Asia: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.

This is quite an interesting exercise, which probably started out just to get the material out there, but became an interesting look at the borders journalists and papers have when it comes to publication: understandably in some cases, as publishing the wrong material about the wrong person may just mean they have you killed or imprisoned.

In the case of our journalists it appears that even offering the material to the state run media in Turkmenistan was sufficient to have them deported from the country. In Afghanistan a young journalist is willing to publish, but on reflection it might just mean he might not live to tell the tale.

We might be thinking that this is the hazard of living in lawless countries, but the film then remarkably pivots back to the west and we see how papers and journalists in the west censor themselves for much the same reasons: a fear of power and backlash.