What I worry about is that somehow the work of this interpretation gets obscured by debates over the quality of the information and what is or is not ‘revealed’ in some objective sense: “this is all they get?”

But my broader concern — and I think that Shirky starts to go here — is with another role for journalists: as custodians of debates over moral and social values. What is meaningful in data (what we ‘find’ there) can only understood against what we believe are matters of concern; what, in essence, we are looking for answers for. And, in that sense, we need to start from that premise to think about what those Wikileaks document mean.

And, what is interesting is that there are lots of value judgments going on here, but with no clearly formed debate and with little in the way of clarifying choices. What is at issue, exactly? For Wikileaks, it appears to be the immorality of the war in Afghanistan, on its face. For some Democratic Senators, it is about the tradeoffs between nation building at home versus abroad. For the Times, it seemed more about a bad ally and official views being at odds with what ground operatives see.

All of which is a rambling way to say, Wikileaks is only significant against a larger backdrop of public debate over the values at stake with this war. Yet, it is that public debate — not the quality of information on the ground — that seems to be the most incoherent and the place where professional journalism (and information activists such as Wikileaks) seems most lacking. I think it is only by fully embracing their interpretative role that journalists can actively create that public debate over what to do.

Do data stories grab the imagination in a way that leads to real discussion and grappling with the issues, or do we need individuals like McChrystal to latch on to and have opinions about?

Jay Rosen worries that stories like the 92,000 docs and the exhaustive analysis of the size of the Top Secret infrastructure are too big to impel a real reaction. I worry that too.