"The political economy of WikiLeaks: Transparency and accountability through digital and alternative media" KEYWORDS: WikiLeaks, uberification, transparency, accountability, 'Collateral Murder,' journalism (original) (raw)
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WikiLeaks and the question of responsibility within a global democracy
European View, 2011
Making sensitive or even secret information public was hitherto the domain of investigative journalism. WikiLeaks has made it possible for whistleblowers to shed light on anything they think the general public should know about. This has given birth to a new breed of journalism. The new way of bringing sensitive information to the public is much less responsible in many respects, even though it can by some measures fulfil the norm of fairness. Who are the affected parties and what are the pros and cons? These are the questions this article seeks to answer by comparing WikiLeaks with classic journalism.
2013
New media are now contributing to the democratization of access to information, its creation, and its consumption. This has effectively altered the coveted gatekeeping and public agenda setting roles usually ascribed to traditional media. At the same time, a new relationship is emerging between these Web 2.0 media platforms and their traditional media counterparts, especially print media. While newspapers sometimes rely on less encumbered online sources for cutting-edge news exposes, the new-media entities also often count on the long-established traditional media institutions to provide credibility and critical analysis of new media’s Web-generated news content. It is this notion of a conjoint approach to political exposure that was evident in the WikiLeaks engagement of and association with traditional news entities such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the Jamaica Gleaner, and other newspapers as outlets for its classified secret content. The chapter argues that ...
WikiLeaks and the Changing Forms of Information Politics in the “Network Society”
Future Trends in Social Media, 2012
This chapter offers an analysis of one instance of "mass self-communication" namely the website WikiLeaks. Founded in 2006 by Australian internet activist Julian Paul Assange, WikiLeaks aimed to facilitate an anonymous electronic drop box for whistleblowers. WikiLeaks has promoted the cause of investigative journalism, organising citizens into a powerful force of news-gatherers, and laying bare a wealth of privileged information. By first disrupting and then decentralising relations of power, WikiLeaks encourages new ways of thinking. At the heart of this process is a radical recasting of what counts as a public service ethos, one which promises to reinvigorate traditional conceptions of journalism's role and responsibilities in a democratic culture.
Defending a Paradigm by Patrolling a Boundary: Two Global Newspapers' Approach to WikiLeaks
Drawing on the concepts of paradigm repair and professional boundary work, this study examined the way the New York Times and the Guardian portrayed the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks as being beyond the bounds of professional journalism. Through a textual analysis of Times and Guardian content about WikiLeaks during 2010 and early 2011, the study found that the Times depicted WikiLeaks as outside journalism’s professional norms regarding institutionality, source-based reporting routines, and objectivity, while the Guardian did so only with institutionality. That value thus emerged as a supranational journalistic norm, while source-based reporting routines and objectivity were bound within national contexts.
WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again, or designing hues of transparency and democracy
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.
A Decade of WikiLeaks: So What?
In this article, I consider how WikiLeaks has gone through a series of metamorphoses: from a small, relatively unknown website devoted to giving whistleblowers space to release their material to one of the best-known activist organizations in the world. In addition, it has gone from being an organization that began by operating as an alternative to the mainstream media, to one that worked with the mainstream, and then to a group that devoted a fair degree of energy to attacking the media. I argue that during this tumultuous period of change, WikiLeaks needs to be understood in relation to its impact upon a number of fundamental relationships central to the study of media and journalism. I use WikiLeaks to consider the importance of studying sites and organizations as cultural artefacts, and to examine the idea that 'everything which has been collected on it, becomes attached to it-like shells on a rock by the seashore forming a whole incrustation'. Academic research itself is, of course, part of this incrustation.