WikiLeaks is in the news again for its release of a video showing a 2007 military attack in Iraq that killed two employees of Reuters. The classified video had been seen by Reuters editors in an off the record viewing after they filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but they had been unable to get a copy. It  currently has over four million YouTube views.

The Pentagon, not surprisingly, is not happy about the release of the video. Critics of WikiLeaks say that the more widely viewed 17 minute edited video is misleading in that it does not “make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade,” according to this New York Times article.

The Times article also delves into how WikiLeaks is able to operate because of the digital age.

By releasing such a graphic video, which a media organization had tried in vain to get through traditional channels, WikiLeaks has inserted itself in the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age. Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.

“The most significant thing about the release of the Baghdad video is that several million more people are on the same page,” with knowledge of WikiLeaks, said Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, who recently published a paper about the site. “It is amazing that outside of the conventional channels of information something like this can happen.”

Nancy Scola of Personal Democracy Forum cautions against viewing the footage as news and a threat to journalism in this post:

But one thing to keep in mind here is that Wikileaks’ tragic footage is a document; it’s not news.

News requires some amount of perspective, context. The problem with seeing this admittedly horrific episode in the Iraq war ripped from its moorings is that the average American news consumer, at least, has been very little prepared to make sense of what it all means, even after seven years of war in Iraq. Is what we’re watching an aberration? Is this a normal Tuesday in Baghdad? The function of a journalistic class is to help citizens make sense of the world, a world that grows ever more confounding every day, especially as we see more of it, in real-time and often in living color. (Not for nothing is the site called Wikileaks, as in collaboration.) As the web made it easier and easier for everyone to collect and distribute bits of information, the American news world has floundered. . . .

The alternative for journalists not afraid of the future is to look at Wikileaks not as a competitor or their replacement, but as an amazing resource of historic possibility. Wikileaks’ video footage that seems to sum up all that is confusing and horrifying about modern war isn’t a threat to journalists. It should be looked upon as manna from heaven.

Scola also includes an interesting addendum as to where the video is most widely viewed:

[A]s this useful infographic from its YouTube page shows, it’s popular in a wide range of countries and regions, including all of Latin and South America, Europe, Russia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and a smattering of African countries including Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria

Not all those countries are close allies of the United States, and the video probably won’t endear the U.S. military to people who think that the Iraq War was wrong. But despite the Pentagon’s opposition to the video’s release, it was unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., less than one mile from the White House.