WikiLeaks, Morgan Tsvangirai and the Guardian – an explanation

Last week, Comment is Free published a piece by James Richardson claiming that WikiLeaks had put Zimbabwean prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, at risk by releasing a US diplomatic cable that showed he had been privately urging Washington to maintain sanctions against Harare, while taking the opposite position in public. WikiLeaks and some commentators suggested this was unfair because it was the Guardian, rather than WikiLeaks, which took the decision to publish the document.

They had a point. On Tuesday, the piece was amended to reflect the Guardian's role in putting the document into the public domain, and an explanatory note added. We should have done that quicker but the readers' editor, our usual channel for corrections, had not received any complaint. Some critics saw malice in the publication of the Richardson piece in the first place: why would the Guardian point the finger at WikiLeaks knowing it had published the cable? In fact, neither Richardson, a first-time contributor to our comment website, nor the US-based editor who handled it, were aware of the somewhat complicated process through which (most) cables were published. The piece was posted on the bank holiday after Christmas. The Guardian's WikiLeaks editing team was not around. They were taking a well-earned break after months of working on the documents.

Although we outlined how the documents were being handled at the start of our series of reports on them, there still seems to be some confusion about the process, so perhaps it's worth reiterating.

The Guardian and four other international news organisations had – and has – access to all 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. When the Guardian released a story based on one or more documents, we generally published the relevant cables, edited where we considered it necessary to protect sources. These redacted versions were shared with WikiLeaks which published them (more or less) simultaneously.

This system applied to most of the cables released up to the end of last year, though WikiLeaks released a small number "unilaterally". So it would be fair to describe us as joint publishers of any cables we have selected, with joint responsibility for any consequences of their release. Our judgment was that publishing the Zimbabwe cable would not place Tsvangirai, a high-profile elected politician who has been publicly highly critical of Robert Mugabe for years, in danger. If we're wrong about that we'll have to accept our share of the blame. But it is not right, as some have implied, to characterise the situation as one in which it was exclusively the Guardian rather than WikiLeaks which is responsible.

Glenn Greenwald argues on Salon.com that our amendments to the Richardson piece are inadequate, and that we ought also to correct a news story about moves against Tsvangirai prompted by the cable releases. I'd say that, taken in its entirety,  the Richardson piece now pretty fairly reflects the process described above, but if anyone disagrees they are free to refer the matter to the Guardian's independent readers' editor.

It's important to remember a bit of context: during the whole period "WikiLeaks" became shorthand used by virtually all journalists the world over for the entire project. This was partly – or even mainly – to give them credit for being the main source (or intermediary) for the material. So, day after day, news organisations such as the BBC and other newspapers reported that "WikiLeaks today revealed that …"

It was often equally true that it was the Guardian, or El País, or the New York Times, which had "done the revealing", not to mention much of the time-consuming work of finding, editing and redacting the material. But it was a piece of widely understood journalistic shorthand. The material was routinely referred to as a "WikiLeaks revelation", including in the Guardian – ironically, perhaps, because we did not want to look as though we were stealing WikiLeaks's thunder or glory.

The vast majority of Guardian stories would use the same formula: "In documents released today by WikiLeaks it was revealed that xxx …" That gave WikiLeaks the credit it both deserved and sought – and was preferable to the alternative: "In documents released today by WikiLeaks, the New York Times, the Guardian, El País, Le Monde and Der Spiegel."

The news piece to which Greenwald objects referred to "confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks". But that was in keeping with the way the Guardian – and other media – covered all disclosures in the cables. We used a similar formula in stories about China, Bangladesh, Russia, the Middle East and South America. It did not reflect any attempt to lay exclusive responsibility at the door of WikiLeaks, any more than it was an attempt to shirk our own. Both the news report and Richardson's piece now include a link to this post.