Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek
Dirk van der Burg
Master Thesis
Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek Supervisor: dr. C.J.
Second Reader: dr. A. Heinrich July 4
Dirk van der Burg S1530623
Master Thesis
Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek Supervisor: dr. C.J.
Second Reader: dr. A. Heinrich July 4, 2011
Dirk van der Burg
Master Thesis
Master Journalistiek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, studiepad dagbladjournalistiek Supervisor: dr. C.J. Peters
Second Reader: dr. A. Heinrich , 2011
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 3
Chapter 1: The Beginning of WikiLeaks ... 7
1.1 2010: Attention for WikiLeaks Explodes, and Changes in its System. ... 11
1.2 The Afghan War Diaries: The First Collaborative effort. ... 14
1.3 The Iraq War Diaries ... 16
1.4 Cablegate: The State Department Embarrassed ... 17
Chapter 2: Sources, WikiLeaks and Media Access ... 21
2.1 What is WikiLeaks? ... 24
2.2 The Tug of War: Source Power ... 27
2.3 The Road to Becoming a Primary Definer ... 32
Chapter 3: The Role of WikiLeaks ... 38
3.1 What Can WikiLeaks Offer? ... 40
3.2 Trusting WikiLeaks ... 41
3.3 Marketing WikiLeaks and Achieving Maximum Impact ... 48
3.4 WikiLeaks’ Strategy ... 56
3.5 WikiLeaks as an Information Broker ... 60
Chapter 4: The Dutch Perspective on WikiLeaks ... 68
4.1 Getting to Know WikiLeaks ... 72
4.2 WikiLeaks’ Role in Journalism ... 73
4.2 Could traditional media do what WikiLeaks does? ... 74
4.3 Does an Agenda Matter? ... 76
4.4 The focus on Assange and WikiLeaks’ marketing campaign ... 77
4.5 WikiLeaks and Source Power ... 80
Conclusion: The Way Forward ... 87
Appendix A: Interview Questions ... 92
Appendix B: Audio Files Interviews ... 94
Introduction
2010 was the year of WikiLeaks. It showed the world that the network age had forever changed the way information is kept secret or made public. It looked like even the smallest, most vulnerable whistleblower could no longer be ignored by the press if WikiLeaks backed him or her. “Give your information to us,” the organization implicitly said. “We’ll make sure attention will be paid.”
And they made good on their promise: As a year of news, 2010 was defined by three major leaks. Two of them dealt with the American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The third leak comprised of thousands of American diplomatic cables. This last leak was the largest in terms of the number of documents leaked and serves as a primary focus in this thesis, which engages with the impact of WikiLeaks on the impact WikiLeaks has on the media landscape and the role it has assumed.
The story of WikiLeaks is not only the story of secret documents being made public. It is also the story of a small group of volunteers, headed by a flamboyant Australian by the name of Julian Assange. This former hacker is controversial, to say the least. Sometimes, he is heralded by the media as a prophet, a modern day Robin Hood, leading the way in a new digital media landscape. According to this narrative, openness is good, information wants to be free, and the revelations made possible by WikiLeaks will ultimately lead to a new and better society, comprised of citizens who are now super-informed.
At others times, he is seen as a crook and a criminal. His organization is panhandling stolen documents. They are putting the safety of innocent civilians in theatres of combat at risk and embarrassing the American government. A government which is already
considerably more open than many other countries in the world. Some say WikiLeaks has a taste for anarchy.
While all interesting questions, the focus in this thesis is on WikiLeaks’ role in the present day media landscape. Specifically, the primary research question it seeks to address is: What is the position WikiLeaks has assumed in this landscape vis-à-vis other sources and the traditional media and what does this mean to journalism? After all, the
organization has in the past shown that it is capable of work that could very well be called journalism. It has created a video that revealed the darker sides of the American war efforts and without the organization, a story such as the high-level corruption scandal in Kenya would still be a secret. Their website allows WikiLeaks to be their own publisher, if they so choose. But the biggest impact WikiLeaks has made on the media landscape occurred when Julian Assange and his colleagues started working with traditional media outlets. From this moment, the organization started to show its true potential. Starting out as a relatively small, underfunded organization, it has somehow grown to be a high-profile, powerful source on par with governments and big institutions. WikiLeaks has information, while the traditional outlets could lend the organization credibility by cooperating with it. For WikiLeaks, this means that the information they have received is seen by a much larger audience than they could have reached by themselves.
Starting with the Afghanistan War Diaries, WikiLeaks collaborated with high profile outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian. A symbiosis occurred, with WikiLeaks providing the information and the traditional press giving context and analysis. From an original position as somewhat marginal, radical activist organization, the role of WikiLeaks was transformed as it became to a very powerful source, that can choose who to work with and on what terms.
newspapers and television networks from around the world asking them for access to their material. When the collaboration with a certain newspaper or outlet does not develop to the liking of WikiLeaks, it terminates that collaboration such as has been done with the New York Times and more recently the Guardian. WikiLeaks shows that power in dealing with the traditional media is no longer only reserved for elite sources. WikiLeaks now adds to the equation a media organization that acts as a middleman between whistleblowers and the ‘old’ media. Traditionally powerful sources such as governments and large institutions are forced to surrender much of their clout. For journalism, it would be very wise to pay attention to this shift in power, as it could well be a sign for things to come.
While WikiLeaks can be seen as the first information broker, it will most likely not be the last. Journalists all over the world may find themselves increasingly dealing not only with elite and non-elite sources, but also with organizations reminiscent of WikiLeaks. With the characteristics of a source, but not quite a source; With some of the capabilities of traditional journalism, but not quite an alternative medium; Part of the impact this information broker has comes from their very hybridness.
In order to examine this exceptional relationship between traditional press and WikiLeaks, I have chosen to it fit into the frameworks considering power relations between sources and the press, provided by the aforementioned scholars. I have tried to place and conceptualize WikiLeaks by attending to traditional analytics, such as the primary definer model as proposed by Hall and the political contest model put forward by Wolfsfeld. These models address the question of power in the journalist-source relationship. The models used are not contesting models, as they complement each other.
In order to apply these models to the WikiLeaks phenomenon, I examined what Dutch journalists and editors who have worked with the organization had to say about the
collaboration. These are interesting to look at, because the Dutch position during Cablegate was unique: while the NOS had managed to secure access to the files by collaborating with WikiLeaks, RTL Nieuws and NRC Handelsblad also had access. In their case, however, no deals were made with WikiLeaks. Instead, they joined forces and turned to the Norwegian Newspaper Aftenposten, which received the exact same database from an undisclosed source. The analysis offered on the Dutch situation that is found in the last chapter of this thesis is based on interviews conducted with representatives with all three of these media.
been done on the subject. Much of this paper therefore relies on discussions and opinion articles that have been found online. To give a more practical and in-depth view of what media professionals think of the organization, I conducted extensive interviews with five Dutch media professionals who work for news organizations that have either dealt with WikiLeaks directly or gained access to the documents it provides in another way. Although this empiric research may be small in its scope, the responses of the interviewees provide a valuable, if impartial, accounting of the view of WikiLeaks in prominent Dutch news
organizations. These people, after all, deal with sources on a day-to-day basis and have made editorial decisions on how to incorporate the information from the WikiLeaks and have made ethical choices on how to manage this unique situation.
Changes are occurring in the media landscape. While the network age has given rise to the concept of citizen journalism, this may not prove to be the most important change.
WikiLeaks is showing that by making use of the possibilities the Internet provides and using a strategy that fits these changes, it is possible to become a high-profile player even without extensive funds or manpower.
Chapter 1: The Beginning of WikiLeaks
“WikiLeaks became a top Google search term as a site once frequented primarily by journalists and activists, became a major media player.”
- Dave Gilson, “What the WikiLeaks Media Blitz Has Revealed About WikiLeaks”, 2010
In order to appreciate the significance of WikiLeaks and its rise to power as a source, it is important to have an overview of events that have lead up to their relative prominence. This chapter provides this overview, zooming in on the principles upon which WikiLeaks was founded as well as the events that took place in 2010, arguably its most successful year when contrasting their achievements with the main goal the organization has explicated: Achieving maximal political impact with the placement of their leaks. WikiLeaks’ stated goals will be discussed in more detail at a later stage in this chapter.
WikiLeaks started as a small organization, relying on donations from sympathizers.1 Furthermore, according to Daniël Domscheit-Berg, who was a WikiLeaks Volunteer until late 2010, the number of volunteers was grotesquely exaggerated. “From the onset, we said we had a couple of thousand of volunteers and hundreds of active volunteers.” 2 WikiLeaks however mentioned the number of people that were on their mailing list. “That meant these people had offered their help at some point, but they were not doing anything. They were just names.”3
Because of its secretive ways, it is neigh impossible to accurately state the real number of volunteers WikiLeaks has. Still, according to German journalists Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, it is safe to say that in its core, it had very small beginnings and is still not large by many means. “To the outside world he [Assange], states that WikiLeaks consists of 22 people that are directly involved with the project,” they write. “In reality, the core consists of five friends and a number of sympathizers.”4 Besides their small numbers however, because of their foundation in hacker culture WikiLeaks is able to generate considerable support by rallying volunteers. A more in depth look at how the hacker ethic contributes to WikiLeaks
1
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks, (Amsterdam: Lebowski, 2011), 86 2 Ibid., 34.
3 Ibid., 34.
will be offered in Chapter 3.2 of this thesis. WikiLeaks has managed to work its way up to becoming a very important source to the traditional media, in particular to a number of primary partners. The basic premise of the service it provides is simple: It offers a safe and anonymous manner in which whistleblowers can upload their material. WikiLeaks then attempts to make it into news, either by publishing about it itself, pointing the information out to other media or, as was the case in 2010, collaborating with a select number of media.
The idea for this new kind of information depository sprouted from the mind of former hacker, Julian Assange, in late 2006. When the WikiLeaks website went online for the first time, the organization mission statement read:
WikiLeaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.5
When this mission statement was posted, the site was not yet fully functional; no documents could be submitted. The site was in its early stages modeled after another new media phenomenon, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Verification and contextualization was to happen by crowdsourcing; visitors of the website actively were intended to be involved in the process, putting their own expertise to good use. In the FAQ section of the website, the process was described as follows:
To the user, WikiLeaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands.6
5
WikiLeaks, “Home” WikiLeaks.org, January 17 2007.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070114162346/http://www.wikileaks.org/index.html (accessed March 15 2011). 6 WikiLeaks, “FAQ” WikiLeaks.org January 17 2007.
It is also interesting to note that WikiLeaks mission statement asserted that its primary focus would be on “oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet-Union, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.” This focus would shift dramatically to the United States in 2010.
Media attention around the launch of the website was rather scarce. Of the major English language newspapers, only the Guardian and the Washington Post dedicated an article to the website. It was not until November 16, 2007 that WikiLeaks started to gather some media attention. It did this by releasing a ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ manual for the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Camp. Still, not every major newspaper picked up on the news. A major American newspaper like the Los Angeles Times, for example, did not run an article on the document. 7Still, slowly but surely, WikiLeaks was making a name for itself as a reliable distributor of secret documents. It did and is still doing this by providing a secure digital drop box of sorts, which (allegedly) cannot be monitored by third parties. Furthermore, WikiLeaks keeps no log of contributors in terms of who leaks documents. The organization promises that the security of the leaker is guaranteed by a number of sophisticated security measures, based on mathematical and cryptographic techniques.8
Between its launch in early 2007 and 2010, WikiLeaks broke news on numerous subjects. In 2008, for instance, it released hundreds of internal memoranda and documents from the Julius Bär Bank concerning its office on the Cayman Islands. In the same year, it made documents public that proved the former president of Kenya, Arap Moi, had siphoned off millions of dollars towards his personal account. The Alaskan governor Sarah Palin was also targeted by the website when it released the contents of her hacked Yahoo! e-mail account. Although some of WikiLeaks’ publications caught the eye of the traditional media, it was dwarfed by the grip WikiLeaks had on the media in 2010.
On December 23 2009, three years after it had been established, WikiLeaks.org was taken offline. According to Daniël Dommscheit-Berg, former right hand man of Assange and one of the founders of the new concept OpenLeaks, this was due to a technical reorganization.9 The downtime was also used to attract additional funding in the form of
7 When a LexisNexis search is done for the term ‘WikiLeaks’ spanning 2007, the release of this manual is the only instance in which more than one newspaper published something on WikiLeaks. Only the New York Times, The Guardian and the Washington Post broke the news.
8 WikiLeaks, “FAQ” WikiLeaks.org January 17 2007.
donations, Domscheit-Berg writes in his book, Inside WikiLeaks.10
The website was back up in early January or 2010, while a wholly redesigned site was launched in May of that year. Although the old site was still accessible in archived form, the new design dropped the crowdsourcing, Wiki-esque aspects of the original website completely. Where the pre-2010 WikiLeaks site resembles the Wikipedia, this is no longer the case with the new site. The site does not invite collaboration, but rather is used as a medium for announcements. It contains a banner with a plea for support alongside a picture of Julian Assange. The importance of Assange for the marketing of WikiLeaks will be explored more in depth later on. The differences between the two versions of the website can be seen in below figures.
Figure 1: The WikiLeaks Homepage as it could be browsed on December 2009 (As archived by Archive.org)
Figure 2: A screenshot of the WikiLeaks Homepage on June 3, 2011. The resemblance with Wikipedia is gone, while a banner with Julian Assange now features prominently. (Screenshot WikiLeaks.ch)
1.1 2010: Attention for WikiLeaks Explodes, and Changes in its System.
Even before the new website was up and running, WikiLeaks was able to draw the eye of the world upon itself. The organization caught the attention of the world in April 2010 with the video Collateral Murder. The video is edited from classified video material recorded by an American AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, designated as Crazy Horse 1-8, on July 12 2007. On that day, the Apache engaged a group of men who were walking in the streets of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
The audio consists of selections from the onboard conversation of the pilot and the gunner. Listening to the recording, it becomes clear that the crew of the helicopter is under the impression that the men are carrying weapons. After asking for the go-ahead from their commanding officer, they proceed to pelt the men with 30mm grenades from the Apache’s main gun.
According to WikiLeaks, it acquired the “video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers.’’11
Of course, the release of the classified video was an embarrassing incident for the American military. Already, the events that took place on July 12 were controversial. Reuters had tried on numerous occasions to find out how two of their employees had been killed. Their requests for clarification of the incident had been denied every time.12 Only after WikiLeaks released the video, did the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen become apparent. According to an article in the New York Times, the army concluded after an investigation that “pilots had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group on the street. No disciplinary action was taken.”13
Although the military did not contest that the material in the video was authentic, it did question the video’s credibility, specifically aiming at the editing WikiLeaks volunteers had done. They had for example decided to slow down the video in order to identify the two Reuters employees. It did not do the same, however, to indicate that the items two other men are carrying looked suspiciously like an AK-47 assault rifle and a rocket-launcher. A spokesman for the military told Fox News “The video only tells you a portion of the activity that was happening that day. Just from watching that video, people cannot understand the complex battles that occurred. You are seeing only a very narrow picture of the events.”14 WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange had earlier acknowledged that “It's likely some of the individuals seen in the video were carrying weapons.”15
The American military was not the only source of criticism. The media itself also had doubts about WikiLeaks and its editorial agenda. The organization released both a short and a full version. While the short clip is 17 minutes long, the full version was also posted on their website. Many saw fault in the way the short video was edited. The fact that weapons could be seen in the video would, according to some, also warrant special attention, but it is not
11 “Collateral Murder,” CollateralMurder.com April 5 2010, http://www.collateralmurder.com/ (accessed December 27 2010).
12 Dean Yates, “Reuters Seeks U.S. Army Video of Staff Killed in Iraq,” Reuters.com July 11 2008, http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL0539996520080711 (accessed December 27 2010).
13 Tim Arango and Elisabeth Bumiller, “For two Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth,” The New York
Times Online, April 6 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07baghdad.html (accessed
January 20 2011). 14
Justin Fishel, “Military Raises Questions about Credibility of Leaked Iraq Shooting Video,” Fox News Online, April 7 2010. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/07/military-raises-questions-credibility-leaked-iraq-shooting-video/ (accessed January 21 2011).
given in the video. Anthony Martinez, a former noncommissioned officer in the American army, said in an interview with the magazine Foreign Policy: "These two guys, they look pretty armed to me, that’s completely ignored”16
Despite the criticism, the release of Collateral Murder showed what WikiLeaks was capable of: With the help of volunteers it could produce a video and a marketing campaign for that video that grabs the attention of the public. It showed that WikiLeaks does not necessarily needed traditional media to reach an audience. Furthermore, potential whistleblowers saw that they could offer their material to this new organization. With Collateral Murder, WikiLeaks took its place in the media landscape and created a basis for their later collaboration with traditional outlets.
Controversial as the video may have been, Collateral Murder did spur an all-out media hype. The American magazine The Atlantic called it “the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos.”17 Guardian reporter Douglas Haddow suggested that the video “will prove to be a landmark event in the reportage of the Iraq war, as it forces the viewer, in the most visceral way possible, to simultaneously confront both the deplorable unreality of American aggression and the grim fate of those caught within its scope.”18 The blogosphere was also buzzing with discussion of Collateral Murder. Especially military-themed blogs, such as Wings over Iraq showed interest in the video and tried to analyze what could be gathered from watching both the edited and the unedited version of the video.
An enormous amount of websites analyzed, mentioned or linked to the video. Today, keying ‘Collateral Murder’ in combination with ‘WikiLeaks’ into the search box of Google Yields more than 330.000 results. Doing the same with the term ‘WikiLeaks’ yields a staggering 65 million results. As Dave Gilson of Mother Jones put it: “WikiLeaks became a
16 Jonathan Stray, “Is This the Future of Journalism?” Foreign Policy, April 7 2010,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/06/is_this_the_future_of_journalism?page=0,1 (accessed January 21 2011).
17 James Fallows “In Case You’ve Missed Them,” The Atlantic Online, April 6 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/04/in-case-you-missed-them/38516/ (accessed March 29 2011).
18 Douglas Haddow, “Grim Truths of WikiLeaks Iraq Video,” The Guardian Online April 7 2010,
top Google search term as a site once frequented primarily by journalists and activists, became a major media player.”19
With the Collateral Murder video, WikiLeaks had effectively established itself as a source for interesting and appealing material. In the next few months, WikiLeaks would use this appeal to collaborate with a number of different media channels.
1.2 The Afghan War Diaries: The First Collaborative effort.
After the video, there was silence from the WikiLeaks camp, but only for a short while. On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks again demanded attention. Not only did they post a substantial number of secret documents concerning the American war efforts in Afghanistan, they had also found a number of media partners to collaborate with the release. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel had all gotten early access to the documents and had devoted a considerable amount of manpower and resources to their analysis. On a synchronized publication date, two of the world’s leading English language newspapers and a respected German magazine all broke news based on the ‘War Diaries’ simultaneously. WikiLeaks meanwhile published documents that were vetted by these organizations.
Both the Guardian as well as the New York Times named their series of stories the War Logs, while Der Spiegel, reminiscent of spy novels, dubbed them The Afghanistan Protocols. While all three publications had similar stories, for instance on the high number of weapons failures of drones or on the Pakistani Secret Service’s involvement with the Taliban, they also gave their stories a distinct identity. According to Joel Maeres of the Columbia Journalism Review, “in shaping their syntheses of these various findings, each paper manages to characterize the discoveries in different ways, mostly to emphasize their relevance to local concerns about the war. The two European papers, both historically against the war, find in the reports cause for great pessimism.”20 Indeed, the Guardian editorial on the War Logs was particularly scathing about the war. It said:
19
Dave Gilson, “What the WikiLeaks Media Blitz Has Revealed About WikiLeaks,” Mother Jones, April 13, 2010, http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/04/wikileaks-assange-media-blitz (accessed January 25 2011) 20 Joel Maeres “Same Docs, Different Stories,” Columbia Journalism Review, July 26 2010,
These war logs – written in the heat of engagement – show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitized “public” war, as glimpsed through official communiqués as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting. […] After nine years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of Afghans cannot be won like this.21
Der Spiegel is not any more positive about the war. In an article called A Gloomy Picture, the following imagery is used:
Nearly nine years after the start of the war, they [the documents] paint a gloomy picture. They portray Afghan security forces as the hapless victims of Taliban attacks. They also offer a conflicting impression of the deployment of drones, noting that America's miracle weapons are also entirely vulnerable.
Moreover, they show that the war in northern Afghanistan, where German troops are stationed, is becoming increasingly perilous. The number of warnings about possible Taliban attacks in the region -- fuelled by support from Pakistan -- has increased dramatically in the past year.22
The only American publication is the least critical of the military, according to Maeres, “emphasizing instead revelations over which Americans are likely to feel betrayed.”23 And indeed, their focus is less on the military aspects of the documents. They do, however, give heavy weight to revelations about the Pakistani Secret Service and their connection to the Taliban.
Of course, other newspaper and media outlets around the world published stories based on the documents. But as they did not have early access to them, they relied heavily on the reporting done by the three early-access publications. Take for instance the front page article War in Afghanistan Grimmer than Previously Thought the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad ran the next day. In the article, the newspaper gives an overview of the findings of the three publications. And although NRC went to great lengths to add some original research to the article, it is very clear that not having access to the source material posed a handicap.24 News outlets which had been successful in approaching WikiLeaks in order to
21 “The War Logs Afghanistan: The Unvarnished Picture” The Guardian, July 26, 2010, 36. 22
Matthias Gebauer and others, “Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It,” Der Spiegel
Online, July 25, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html (accessed December 30, 2010).
23 Maeres, “Same Docs”.
collaborate on the project had a distinct advantage over newspapers such as NRC Handelsblad. WikiLeaks was already showing to be more than a simple source. It could choose which outlets to work with, using exclusivity as a source of power. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, in which the focus will be on how journalism professionals from three Dutch outlets view WikiLeaks, both as an organization and as an ‘affair’.
1.3 The Iraq War Diaries
Notwithstanding the criticism WikiLeaks came to endure, the organization continued to publish leaks. They followed the documents on the war in Afghanistan up with another substantial leak, this time dealing with the war efforts in Iraq. WikiLeaks released around 400,000 documents on the war, the largest leak ever of classified material to date.
Again, WikiLeaks chose to give selected media early access.25 And again, the stories that were written based on the documents portrayed a bleak image of the American war efforts. The biggest stories coming from the Iraq War documents were on the torture of prisoners taken by the Americans. The Qatar-based Al Jazeera, for instance, said about the documents: “In graphic detail they record extensive abuse at Iraqi police stations, army bases and prisons. On more than 1.300 occasions US troops reported the allegations to superiors." They furthermore point out a military order stating “provided the initial reports confirm that no U.S. Forces were involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by hhq.”26 Al Jazeera continues indicating that what the U.S. military proclaimed in the media was not in line with what the official, classified reports have to say about torture.
The New York Times published similar examples of the official releases of the military not being in line with what the reports reveal. The government’s official standpoint on civilian deaths had always been that they were not officially counted. However, official ‘guidepost’ numbers that were submitted to congress show that the army’s estimate of civilian
25
To be precise, The New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Al Jazeera, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
26 “WikiLeaks Iraq Files Reveal Torture,” Al Jazeera October 22, 2010,
deaths were comparable to estimates by NGOs such as the Iraq Body Count, “an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers.”27
The Guardian similarly focuses on the torture events and the unmentioned civilian deaths. Der Spiegel meanwhile used the documents to create a number of infographics, including a timeline and an interactive map on its website.
Some cracks were beginning to appear in the public image of WikiLeaks. The main complaint about the Iraq documents was that not enough news was to be found in them. In an interview with France 24, David Betz of the Department of War Studies of King’s College in London said:
I don’t think there are going to be revelations in here that were not understood to have happened already. It’s not that much of a surprise that Iraqi authorities have mistreated their detainees. It’s public knowledge that Iraqi authorities were deeply wound up in the sectarian conflict. The bottom line is that, with this particular release, it may well contain some kind of bombshell, but with the volume of documents involved, it may be some time before we hear anything we don’t already know.28
To be sure, the revelations stemming from the documents were in some cases gruesome, but they did not lead to public outcry. Still, when WikiLeaks followed the Iraq War Logs up with yet another release of a large archive of classified material, the media once again pounced on it.
1.4 Cablegate: The State Department Embarrassed
On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks embarrassed the American government once again when it released a large number of diplomatic cables to a select number of media outlets. WikiLeaks claims to have some 250,000 diplomatic cables sent from United States embassies
27Sabrina Tavernisse and Andrew W. Lehren. “A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq,” New York Times
Online, October 22 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23casualties.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all (Accessed January 25, 2011).
all over the world back to the State Department in Washington. As was beginning to turn into routine, selected media were granted early access, while the rest of the world’s media had to wait until WikiLeaks would drip feed a limited number of the cables to the world by posting them on their website. In all likelihood, the ‘drip feeding’ WikiLeaks did with the diplomatic cables was not only part of a well thought-out media strategy; It also shows that the whistleblowing-organization is in an interdependent relationship with traditional media, which have the manpower to analyze the cables and do ‘harm minimization’ on them. This interdependency between the ‘old’ media and WikiLeaks is further discussed in Chapter 3.
As with its first joint project with traditional media, there was criticism. Conservative commentator Max Boot, for instance, said:
We now seem to have reached a moment when the West’s major news organizations, working hand in glove with a sleazy website, feel free to throw spitballs at those who make policy and those who execute it. This is journalism as pure vandalism. If I were responsible, I would feel shame and embarrassment. But apparently, those healthy emotions are in short supply these days.29
Moreover, the Cablegate episode was also marked by animosity between media outlets and WikiLeaks’ founder and main spokesperson Assange. From its very start, it appeared that the makeup of the project had changed. The New York Times, which WikiLeaks had allowed early access to in the two earlier instances of leaks concerning the United States, was not included in the original media partners. The reason for this was an article the Times had ran alongside the Iraq leaks. The article, which described the tensions between Assange and former colleagues, did not please Assange at all, and he accused the New York Times of tabloid behavior. A week later, in a talk Assange held in London, he wondered “Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?”30 Still, the newspaper managed to get its hands on the cables through their English colleagues at The Guardian.
More recently, The Guardian itself was also ousted from the select inner circle of media with which WikiLeaks chooses to work. From December, 2010 through February, 2011 tension was building between the two. Julian Assange was being accused of a sex crime in Sweden, and The Guardian did not hesitate to report on the matter. According to Assange,
29Max Boot, “Journalism That Knows no Shame,” Commentary Magazine November 28, 2010, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/boot/382682 (accessed February 4, 2011).
the paper did so selectively and in the beginning of February 2011, WikiLeaks broke off its partnership with the newspaper. This is one of the key differences between WikiLeaks and other non-elite sources31: its dependency on any single traditional medium is much smaller.
Because the diplomatic cables contained American information and opinion about virtually every country in the world, they attracted even more attention from the international media than the Afghanistan or Iraq War Diaries had done. By the time interest for Cablegate seemed to be waning internationally, the Dutch press was still very much interested in what United States diplomats had to say about The Netherlands. Yet no Dutch media outlet was part of the selected media.
This situation changed on January 14, 2011. On that date, broadcaster RTL as well as national newspaper NRC Handelsblad announced that they had received the cables. Not by establishing a relationship with WikiLeaks itself, but through a favor from the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten.
On December 23, Aftenposten made public the news that they had received the diplomatic cables from a source that was not WikiLeaks. Of course, they refused to give out any details on this source. The editorial manager of Aftenposten, Ronny Ruud, told Yahoo! News: “I emphasize that we have access to all documents without any clauses or bonds. The documents will be continuously reviewed as the basis of articles by the same editorial criteria and ethical rules as the rest of the journalism in Aftenposten.”32
While both NRC and RTL subsequently contacted Aftenposten to receive the cables, the Dutch public news broadcaster NOS decided to take a different approach. On the same day their competitors announced that they had gained access to the files, NOS editor-in-chief Hans Laroes flew to England to meet with Julian Assange personally. Laroes flew back to The Netherlands carrying a USB flash drive containing the diplomatic cables.
The main difference with the two earlier releases was the pacing of the reporting. Both the Afghanistan and the Iraq logs were a motivation for the involved media to release their biggest stories on the same day. With the cables however, reporting was drawn out. Every day, a few stories based on the cables would appear in the media.
31
The concept of elite and non-elite sources will be expanded upon in Chapter 2.
Although Assange and WikiLeaks had always been controversial, this reached its pinnacle during the release of the cables. More stories started to appear focusing on the inner struggles of WikiLeaks, with a number of volunteers walking away from the project. According to Der Spiegel journalists Marcel Rosenbach & Holger Stark, a number of important volunteers could no longer identify with the organization, as Assange was running it in a despotic manner.33 This gives WikiLeaks the characteristics of a Single Person Organization, a concept which will be expanded on slightly in Chapter 3.3 of this thesis. Moreover, during this time, Assange was also arrested and taken into custody in the United Kingdom on account of a pending extradition to Sweden. During Cablegate, the case that was being prepared in Sweden against Assange for sexually assault drew much media attention.
Notwithstanding the criticism and the controversy that is currently part of WikiLeaks’ image, last year has seen the organization grow from an unknown, somewhat gimmicky, source, to a force to be reckoned with. Newspapers and other outlets which are normally not very open to small and fairly radical organizations, have lined up to use WikiLeaks’ information and even to work together with them. This relationship between WikiLeaks and news outlets was not an ordinary exchange between media and source. Not only does WikiLeaks get ‘paid’ by the media by giving their information and their organization attention, WikiLeaks can also broker deals with more than one medium simultaneously. Moreover, Assange is present at meetings and assisted journalists with accessing the information in the newsrooms of the select group of participating media.34 Still, journalists such as Eric Schmitt stated that WikiLeaks did not really have a say in how the material was handled: “[W]e were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was.”35 In the next chapter, the relationship between different types of sources and traditional media is explored. In this particular context, WikiLeaks’ is very intriguing; as it is one of the first examples of a new type of organization journalism will have to deal with in the future.
33
Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, Staatsvijand Nummer 1 (Amsterdam, Lebowski 2011) 204. 34
Rosenbach, Staatsvijand Nummer 1, 228
Chapter 2: Sources, WikiLeaks and Media Access
“News represents who are the authorized knowers and what are their authoritative versions of reality.”
-Richard V. Ericson et al. Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources, 1989.
Although WikiLeaks had already been in existence for over three years, in 2010 it skyrocketed to the top of the firmament, quickly becoming a notable influence in the field of journalism. It established partnerships with a number of prominent publications, its information was sought after by other media and its front man, Julian Assange, became a celebrity almost overnight. WikiLeaks’ rise is not a fluke; rather, it could very well mark a significant shift in the relationship between the traditional media and (a certain new type of) source. WikiLeaks and the information it had a profound effect on the news for almost the entirety of 2010. WikiLeaks, which can be safely considered both activist and rather radical in its beliefs, has managed to overcome the hurdles that are normally placed in the path of such organizations. The ideology of Assange and his colleagues has been described by friends and foes alike as anarchistic and anti-government at its core. Peter Baofu, for instance, wrote in the Russian newspaper Pravda: “Assange, as a young man of ambition, enjoys the attention of the world, and he has an anarchist temptation to bring havoc to it. The more he can bring chaos to the world out of its current rigidness, the better it is for his own personal satisfaction.”36 Open government-advocate Steven Aftergood, who runs the blog Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News, also finds fault with the goals and ways of WikiLeaks. A casual observer thinking of WikiLeaks as a group of liberals fighting against censorship, says Aftergood, would be wrong. “In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.”37 Aftergood’s opinion of WikiLeaks is remarkable, as he was quite positive about the project when it started. In January of 2007, Aftergood was quoted in a Washington
36
Peter Baofu, “The Case of WikiLeaks, and the Western Ideology of Transparency,” Pravda.ru, December 11 2010, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/11-12-2010/116141-wikileaks_ideology_transparency-0/ (accessed March 1 2011).
Post article, saying that WikiLeaks was an intriguing effort with “the potential to make the difference.”38 Even if WikiLeaks would have the manpower and the resources to try and change government(s) from within, its ideological basis would effectively bar this option. This chapter will explore the process of overcoming the obstacles in WikiLeaks’ path towards media access and will show which developments in the media landscape have enabled WikiLeaks to do so. It will also show that although WikiLeaks may not have had a hand in these developments themselves, it has surely used them in such a way that allowed them to have maximum impact. With each of its major releases, WikiLeaks was able to shape the news agenda. . According to research done by Pew Research Center, the war in Afghanistan was once again put on the media agenda by the stories based on the WikiLeaks documents, “Taken together, coverage of the WikiLeaks saga and the overall war effort combined to fill 19% of the [American] newshole,”39 in the week between July 26 and August 1 of 2010, as shown in Figure 1.
The impact on American news coverage WikiLeaks has is also evident from a similar study the Pew Research Center did in December of 2010, when WikiLeaks was releasing the diplomatic cables in collaboration with their media partners. This time, 16% of coverage revolved around the WikiLeaks releases. And, says the rapport, “For the week, Assange was the No. 2 overall newsmaker, trailing only President Obama,” showing how important the WikiLeaks front man is for the organization40.
38 Elizabeth Williamson, “Freedom of Information, the Wiki Way,” Washington Post, January 15 2007, Sec. A. 13.
39
Mark Jurkowitz, “WikiLeaks Puts Afghanistan Back on Media Agenda,” Pew Research August 3, 2010. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1685/wikileaks-afghanistan-media-coverage (accessed June 7, 2011) 40 Mark Jurkowitz, “Taxes, Debt and Leaks Dominate the Week,” Journalism.org December 7, 2010.
Figure 3: News coverage Afghanistan Leaks (Graph taken from Pew Research Center)
Figure 4: News Coverage Cablegate (Graph taken from Pew Research Center)
News, “news represents who are the authorized knowers and what are their authoritative versions of reality.”41 Why exactly the media favor authoritative sources and how they become authoritative will be explored later in this chapter. For now, however, it is not difficult to imagine that WikiLeaks, activist and radical as it is, does not fit the standard description of the ‘authorized knower’. And yet, in 2010 at least, they were allowed to influence “every person’s daily barometer of ‘the knowledge structure of society.’42
The focus in this chapter then will be on the power relationship between sources and media, and the unique position WikiLeaks has in this respect. Every struggle for source power consists of two elements. There is the more practical and direct issue of gaining access to the media, or getting one’s voice heard. Once access is gained, there is also the struggle for meaning-making, or power over the symbols that are used in discourse. Although both elements are relevant, the latter goes beyond the scope of this thesis. Rather, this chapter will shed light on the position of WikiLeaks in relation to the traditional media and how it has been able to maximize media access and impact on the news agenda.
2.1 What is WikiLeaks?
How can we classify WikiLeaks? In its essence, of course, it’s an activist organization with roots in hacker culture, seemingly chasing the idea of a utopian society in which all information is available to everyone. “Information,” their maxim seems to be, “wants to be free.”43 Their agenda is out in the open and is seen by many as quite radical. Professor of Sociology Frank Furedi, for example, is of the opinion that WikiLeaks is not active in journalism but in voyeurism. “This notion of ‘a right to know’ is really about cynically manipulating people’s imagination; bite-sized, easily consumable voyeuristic bits of gossip are recast as vital parts of the public-service provision of truth” Furedi writes.44 Others, such as Professor Stephen J.A. Ward find fault not so much with the basic activities, but with the
41 Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Barnanek and Janet B.L. Chan, Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 3.
42 Ibid. 43
For a more in depth look at this ethic, see: John Katz, “Birth of a Digital Nation” Wired, April 1997, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/netizen.html (accessed June 10, 2011).
lack of ethical guidelines for this type of media organization. “When any media entity gains political and moral power, ethicists and journalists should sit up and ask tough questions,” Ward says. “This is especially the case where the entity has an opaque structure, a beguiling rhetoric, and is operated by advocates.”45 Their material is eagerly used by media around the world. The source material WikiLeaks is trusted, as it was originally meant for internal use by the American government or military. Because of this, it is void of spin. According to Le Monde Diplomatique’s Christian Christensen:
The real power of WikiLeaks is not so much the technology (it helps, but there are millions of websites out there) but the trust readers have in the authenticity of what they are reading; they believe that those working at WikiLeaks stand behind the veracity of the material.46
The target of their most influential leaks, the government of the United States, has lost much of its credibility. Although it sees itself as a guiding light, piloting other countries to more open forms of government and democracy, it was now exposed by a small organization of activists with a knack for technology. The possibilities of the Internet, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just months earlier described as creating “a new nervous system for our planet […] making governments more accountable,47 were now used by a WikiLeaks to embarrass the American Government itself.
Even when simply looking at the WikiLeaks organization as a source then, the prominence and importance to the media is extraordinary, even more so when WikiLeaks’ (estimated) size and financial clout are considered. WikiLeaks seems to have circumvented or conquered the hurdles that in most cases prevent small, activist organizations from achieving (significant) media access. Often, they are not taken seriously by the media at all, or they can only gain publicity by doing something extraordinary such as protesting. When they are allowed to comment on an issue, they are often left responding to what elite sources have stated. The problems smaller organizations normally have with this will be discussed more specifically in the next section of this chapter. Obviously, this is for a large part due to the
45 Stephen J.A. Ward, “How to Reveal Secrets”, The Canadian Journalism Project, August 24, 2010. http://www.j-source.ca/english_new/detail.php?id=5492 (accessed February 14, 2011)
46
Christian Christensen, “Three Digital Myths”, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2010. http://mondediplo.com/blogs/three-digital-myths (accessed June 10, 2011).
impact and appeal of the material that they are distributing. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the success of WikiLeaks simply to the information they are redistributing amongst a number of selected media and, on a smaller scale, publishing on their own website. It has employed tactics to maximize success. Furthermore, the charm and media appeal of founder Julian Assange can be considered both a blessing and a curse. As a tall, white haired man with an Australian accent with an air of secrecy, he is easily made into either a hero or a villain in a story. While it is safe to say that his personality helped tremendously in putting WikiLeaks on the map, the controversy that currently surrounds the Australian-born hacker may ultimately mean the demise of the organization. The role Assange plays in obtaining publicity for his organization will be discussed in the next chapter, while the opinion of a number of Dutch journalists is analyzed in Chapter 4 of this thesis.
While WikiLeaks has managed to gain access to the press I would propose that WikiLeaks is also more than a simple source. The organization seems to agree, as they indicate that they are a media organization, and Julian Assange himself has on numerous occasions claimed to be a journalist. Although to argue that WikiLeaks is or is not journalism would be nearly impossible as there is no consensus of what exactly journalism is, there is no denying that WikiLeaks’ activities in some instances overlap what is generally seen as journalism. It has used sources presented to them and given it context, such as in the case of Collateral Murder. Moreover, the organization went to lengths to make the original material they obtained more readable. This was, according to Domscheit-Berg, the case with the logs the organization had containing text messages sent from the Twin Towers area on September 11 2001.48 I would therefore argue that WikiLeaks is definitely a player in the field of journalism, albeit it would perhaps go too far to claim that WikiLeaks is journalistic. It is still important however, to investigate where WikiLeaks fits into the structure of media organizations that together form the media landscape.
I will attempt to answer a question that has already been asked in various forms. For instance, Alexis Madrigal, a technology writer for The Atlantic, posed the following problem: “At the end of the day, WikiLeaks drives (big) news when it wants to – yet it’s not a news organization, not just a dump of anonymous leads, and many people trust its sourcing (even if
cautiously). So, then, what is it?”49 Or, to put it more precisely, what is its position vis-à-vis the media? This relationship between media and sources (or in WikiLeaks’ case, a new type of media entity) has been studied by a number of influential scholars. In the next section, their work is discussed.
2.2 The Tug of War: Source Power
A central element of this question is the way in which WikiLeaks seems to be able to ‘drive big news when it wants to.’ WikiLeaks seems to exert an extraordinary amount of power, especially when the agenda-driven nature of the organization is considered, as well as its perceived size and the financial means at its disposal. At its core, WikiLeaks does not seem to be anymore than a charismatic leader in the form of Julian Assange with a relatively small number of likeminded volunteers at his side. And yet, WikiLeaks has seemingly been catapulted into the major league of sources. As Geert Lovink and Patricia Riemens eloquently state:
For better or for worse, WikiLeaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, WikiLeaks has briefly become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. By virtue of its disclosures, WikiLeaks, small as it is, appears to carry the same weight as government or big corporations – in the domain of information gathering and publicizing at least.50
As a media organization WikiLeaks holds an amount of power and control over the media that is, under normal circumstances, only reserved for governments or big corporations. WikiLeaks then, has claimed its place in a hierarchy of sources in a very short amount of time. Furthermore, as an oppositional, politically-marginal organization, WikiLeaks would not have been able to claim that spot in the first place. That is, if traditional source power theory still holds true to this day.
49
Alexis Madrigal, “WikiLeaks may have just Changed the Media Too,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/wikileaks-may-have-just-changed-the-media-too/60377/ (accessed 16 January 2011).
In order to estimate what place an organization like WikiLeaks would normally hold relative to other sources available to the media, it is useful to establish its position in the political landscape. Obviously, they are not a representative of big business or government. On the contrary, their sole raison d’être seems to be to uncover what big business and government does not want the public to know. The agenda is, according to the organization, to inform the public about the mishaps of the big players in the political field, so that the public can make an informed choice. The organization may be classified as, what Wynn Grant calls in his book Pressure Groups, Politics and Democracy in Britain, ‘ideological outsiders’, adopting methods “which place them outside what is regarded as the normal spectrum of political activity.”51 That WikiLeaks is indeed operating outside of that spectrum can be gleaned from an essay its founder Julian Assange wrote in December of 2006, a year before WikiLeaks was established. In it, Assange says “to radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed.”52 He urges his peers to approach the problem creatively, and “discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.”53
To reach their ambition – forcing government to be more transparent – WikiLeaks appears to require media attention. Without this media attention, their message would fall (and before 2010 in many cases fell) on deaf ears. And herein lays the problem for small (activist) organizations: The media have, according to scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Schlesinger and Gadi Wolfsfeld, a tendency to not use them as a source, effectively muting their message. This is not caused by conspiracy or a general distaste of activism that lingers in the media. Rather, say cultural theorist Stuart Hall et al., it is result inherent to daily journalistic practice.
The media, be it broadcast or print, need sources in order to produce what we, as an audience, consider to be news. Ericson et al. state that, although a plethora of other sources such as statistics or documents is available, the media often quote what they feel are authoritative figures. “Typically, the journalist seeks a source in the know to say it is so, and has a routine, predictable supply of such sources in established organizations.”54 Drawing on
51
Wynn Grant, Pressure Groups, Politics and Democracy in Britain, (New York: Phillip Alain, 1989), 140. 52
Julian Assange, “The Non Linear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Government” IQ. Org 31 December 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20070110200827/http://iq.org/conspiracies.pdf (accessed January 20 2011). 53 Assange, “Effects of Leaks”
the work of Herman and Chomsky, Daniel A. Berkowitz summarizes the effect of this practice as follows: “Essentially, journalism’s paradigm follows a science like model, where reporters gather authoritative data and then present it without explicitly taking a side in the discourse. Experts and officials – as sources – become the providers of this data, so that reporters become beholden to them for the raw materials of the news.”55
This would lead to a bias towards official sources from government and large institutions in favor of sources that are deemed less authoritative or reliable. In the landmark study Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall developed a theory describing this phenomenon. The media, he said, have a tendency to use elite sources more than other sources, making them ‘primary definers’. The use of primary definers, Hall argues, is part of the routine of news production and works in favor of the spread of dominant ideas.56
Of course, Hall is quick to state that this is not a simple conspiracy theory about how the dominant class controls the media. Rather, he argues, the use of primary definers is governed by a number of factors, one being the “internal pressures of news production.”57 “Reporters,” says Berkowitz, “must develop strategies and procedures to help ensure they will produce their product on time and in a form that their peers will judge as good.”58
Although the exclusion of a certain type of source does not seem to fit into the media’s quest for objectivity, balance and impartiality, according to Hall, “these professional rules give rise to the practice of ensuring that media statements are, wherever possible, grounded in ‘objective’ and ‘authoritative’ statements from ‘accredited sources.” 59
In practice, Hall states, this means journalists have a tendency to turn to accredited representatives of major social institutions, such as members of parliament, heads of industry and leaders of trade unions. These sources are accredited because they either represent the people, such as members of parliament or in the United States members of Congress, or are representatives of organized interest groups. They have a high institutional power and position.60
55 Daniel A. Berkowitz, “Reporters and Their Sources,” in The Handbook of Journalism Studies (New York: Routlegde, 2009), 102.
56
Hall, Policing the Crisis, 57. 57
Ibid., 57.
58 Berkowitz, “Reporters and their Sources, 103. 59 Hall, Policing the Crisis, 58.
Another accredited source, Hall explains, is the expert. Although their institutional power and position is limited or even non-existent, their perceived objective or disinterested pursuit of knowledge makes them a viable source for media.61 In a way, WikiLeaks could be considered an expert organization. Indeed, their expertise in attracting sensitive material seems unprecedented, while at the same time they seem to be the frontrunners of a new kind of data-driven journalism. However, the key term in this definition is ‘disinterested’, a quality which WikiLeaks seems to have lost. If WikiLeaks were to function as an expert, it would need to uphold its role as a ‘neutral conduit’. According to Rosenbach and Stark, the organization had indeed started out as such a conduit, ‘When a document me their own, somewhat vague criteria, it was published without further ado.62 In 2010, however, it has effectively cast aside its ‘first in, first out’ principle. In July of 2010 the organization “hadn’t published anything in the order it came in for a long time. Instead, we ignored the big pile and concentrated on the big bangs,” Daniel Domscheit-Berg said.63 In an article in the German Magazine Freitag, Domscheit-Berg criticized this change of method. WikiLeaks, says Dommscheit Berg, should be:
A neutral institution which should see itself solely as a service provider. This means it should receive, process and evaluate documents. It should not lose sight of this role, and it should not act as a gatekeeper, even if it receives large volumes of documents.64
From this decision, one could infer that WikiLeaks is not simply a modern version of the manila envelope. Instead, it is actively choosing which material to release first. The organization actively sought out a release strategy that would get the material the maximum amount of publicity. WikiLeaks no longer pretends to be neutral. According to David Kushner of Mother Jones:
It has since moved away from crowdsourcing the analysis of leaks and has even publicly toyed with the idea of selling its juiciest material to the highest bidder. It also no longer claims to be a neutral messenger: It created a site called
61
Ibid., 58. 62
Rosenbach, Staatsvijand Nummer 1, 112. 63 Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks, 213.
64 Daniel Domscheit-Berg, “Der gute Verrat,” Freitag, Oktober 14 2010.
CollateralMurder.com to host the Iraq helicopter footage; WikiLeaks and Assange were quick to call out those who offered differing interpretations of the video.65
With WikiLeaks’ agenda being out in the open, the media could not justify presenting WikiLeaks as an expert organization. Here, the effect of WikiLeaks’ ideology also becomes apparent. WikiLeaks could more easily be categorized as a group of axe grinders or advocates rather than neutral experts, and cannot be presented as experts because they lack the (perceived) objectivity.
Government, big business and in many cases experts not only have easy access to the media, according to Hall they even have over-access. They can be easily reached and can be counted on to say something of interest to the public, which satisfies the media’s need for swiftness. And because what they say can be presented as fact instead of opinion, these primary definers also satisfy the need for ‘objectivity’. This “structured preference”, Hall claims, is what makes the media give preference to the opinions of the powerful. Their voices are “placed higher in a hierarchy of credibility than competing secondary definers.”66
When labeling these accredited sources as primary definers, one obviously does not imply that other sources are not heard at all. Indeed, according to Hall, in the name of balance, other sources are allowed to explain their points of view in the media as well. The problem that arises for these secondary definers is not only that they are not only that they are not used as a source as often as primary definers, they are also relegated to responding to problems that are already defined by the primary definers. As Hall puts it: “Arguments against a primary interpretation are forced to insert themselves into its definition of ´what is at issue´ – they must begin from this framework of interpretation as their starting-point.”67
In essence, the structure journalism using primary and secondary definers leaves the latter with only the option to react with “yes, but …” responses. The framework “provides the criteria by which all subsequent contributions are labeled as ‘relevant’ to the debate, or ‘irrelevant’ – beside the point.”68 This means that the powerful have an intrinsic advantage
65 David Kushner, “Click and Dagger: Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory,” Mother Jones, June 2, 2010.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/click-and-dagger-wikileaks-julian-assange-iraq-video-updated?page=2 (accessed March 25, 2011).
66Paul Manning, News and News Sources: A Critical Reader (London: Sage, 2001) 138. 67 Hall, Policing the Crisis, 59.
over the politically marginal in that the framing of a story and the news agenda in general is for a large part dependent on them.
This analysis of primary and secondary definers shows, according to Hall, “precisely how one particular professional practice ensures that the media, effectively but ‘objectively’, play a key role in reproducing the dominant field of the ruling ideologies.”69 As WikiLeaks and other organizations before it have shown, it is possible to move up our down the hierarchical ladder that dictates whether one is granted media access or not. Some scholars therefore do not agree with the inflexibility of Hall’s model.
2.3 The Road to Becoming a Primary Definer
In Hall’s model, WikiLeaks, not being governmental or part of the corporate world, would be relegated to the position of a secondary definer. The rigidity of the ‘primary definer’ would also indicate that WikiLeaks should not have been able to outgrow this role. But, as Lovink and Riemens stated, “WikiLeaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics.”70
Although it would go too far as to say that WikiLeaks’ has reached the status of primary definer, Hall’s model does not account for the success and power the organization has acquired, indicating that something is missing from the theory. And indeed, although the basic premise of sources as primary and secondary definers is still considered useful, more recently academics such as Phillip Schlesinger have found flaws in Hall’s theory. In their eyes, the conceptualization is far too rigid, positioning sources as either primary or secondary and having a hierarchy flow from that.
The official sources that are labeled as primary definers, Schlesinger says, are not always on the same page. Often, they are in contention with each other. Schlesinger poses the following question: “In cases of dispute, say, among members of the same government over a key question of policy, who is the primary definer or (and it goes against the logic of the concept) can there be more than one?”71 This concept could also be applied to the WikiLeaks
69
Ibid., 60.
70 Lovink, “Ten Theses”.
