John Pilger, The Global War on Assange - Journalism and Dissent (original) (raw)

Annotated bibliography on Wikileaks media coverage

As a result of Wikileaks' cooperation with traditional media, the line between journalism and activism was blurred and investigative journalism was encouraged. Robert Rosenthal, who leads the Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIR), said about his project: "you can point people to information, guide people to take action… Getting people to come together around problems is something the media can do more and more." (The Economist) Examples of activist groups involved with Wikileaks would be hackers, Internet users and free speech advocates. The groups called Anonymous and Operation Payback tried to defend Wikileaks by attacking its opponents. They carried a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and made the targeted websites (Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Postfinance) temporarily unavailable. Nonetheless, some journalists argue, "DDoS may lead to a crackdown on Internet freedom, as governments seek to establish tighter control over cyberspace" (Slate). Some called the attacks to be vandalism and civil disobedience. After the attacks, Twitter and Facebook suspended the Anonymous accounts. Another example of activism related to Wikileaks would be hundreds of mirror websites that started to appear on the Internet after the original Wikileaks websites was taken down.

“Bullets of Truth”: Julian Assange and the Politics of Transparency

This essay updates (to early 2019) earlier work on the WikiLeaks story in order to consider what more recent developments reveal about the theoretical promise that Assange articulated at the time of the website’s emergence. Assange has characterized secrecy as both a form and symptom of corruption, and ultimately as the foundation of a “conspiracy” of governance that states like the U.S. inflict on their subjects and the world. He advocates a non-political, vigilante form of transparency in which WikiLeaks serves as a neutral entity that will save the public and free the world with information. He predicted that corrupt political orders would fall as the threat of exposure forces the collapse of their conspiratorial communication networks. But WikiLeaks has failed not only to save the world but to save itself from politics—and in the process has itself become a bit player in the larger geo-political drama that it had hoped to disrupt. Assange’s theory of information disclosure, as well as his assumptions about the state and governing institutions, have proven far too descriptively and normatively simple. More prominent, less radical theories of transparency should take note of these failures to the extent that they share many of his assumptions.

Globally networked public spheres? The Australian media reaction to WikiLeaks

2011

The global release of 250,000 US Embassy diplomatic cables to selected media sites worldwide through the WikiLeaks website, was arguably the major global media event of 2010. As well as the implications of the content of the cables for international politics and diplomacy, the actions of WikiLeaks and its controversial editor-in-chief, the Australian Julian Assange, bring together a range of arguments about how the media, news and journalism are being transformed in the 21st century. This paper will focus on the reactions of Australian online news media sites to the release of the diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, including both the online sites of established news outlets such as The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the ABC's The Drum site, and online-only sites such as Crikey, New Matilda and On Line Opinion.

Free Speech and The Failed Fourth Estate

2019

Media freedom is indispensable to a democracy. The perception is that independent news media will enable free and fair elections and shine a spotlight on corruption, thereby functioning as the fourth estate. Yet political leaders often defend restricting media autonomy arguing that irresponsible news coverage will incite political violence-theoretically destabilizing the government and in effect acting as a 'fifth column.' Edmund Burke, a British parliamentarian and an 18th century British political philosopher, imbedded the concept of the 'Fourth Estate' saying, "there were Three Estates in Parliament (an inheritable crown; inheritable peerage; and a House of Commons) but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." 1 It would be two years before the drafting of the First Amendment and that makes it possible that the framers were familiar with the 'Fourth Estate' metaphor. Evidence exists that they recognized the main press as having the assets of a Fourth Estate. 2

Disclosure’s Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency

Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm and stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure's beneficial effects against its harmful ones—what I have described as transparency's balance. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure's effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks' ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass the legal framework that would otherwise allow courts and officials to consider and balance disclosure's effects. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens to make transparency's balance irrelevant. Second, its recent massive disclosures of U.S. military and diplomatic documents allow us to reconsider and test the assumption that disclosure produces certain effects that can serve as the basis for judicial and administrative prediction, calculation, and balancing. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens transparency's balance by disproving its assumption that disclosure necessarily has predictable, identifiable consequences that can be estimated ex ante or even ex post. This Article studies WikiLeaks in order to test prevailing laws and theories of transparency that build on the assumption that disclosure's effects are predictable, calculable, and capable of serving as the basis for adjudicating difficult cases. Tracing WikiLeaks' development, operations, theories, and effects, it demonstrates the incoherence and conceptual poverty of an effects model for evaluating and understanding transparency.

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.