'Protecting Sources: From Shield Laws to Wikileaks' (original) (raw)
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The mainstream news media are expected to facilitate democracy by informing citizens , and holding corporations and governments accountable. This article demonstrates the uberization of the media through an analysis of WikiLeaks. Due to the complicity of the mainstream news media within the nation state – influenced by economic and political power relations – journalism becomes incapable of promoting this transparency and accountability, leaving those necessities to the public – and to alternative media platforms. Alternative media platforms such as WikiLeaks, which exist transnationally and are not beholden to one state, have the potential to fulfil journalism's traditional role of transparency and accountability. We argue that the release of the 'Collateral Murder' video by WikiLeaks, and the surrounding events, is an example of how alternative media platforms uberify journalism through the dissemination of information, avoiding the barriers that limit mainstream news media and thus become journalism's future. This draws into question the future development of journalism, in particular values and norms around accountability,
Government Secrecy, the Ethics of Wikileaks, and the Fifth Estate
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This paper aims to systematically explore and provide answers to the following key questions: When is government secrecy justified? In a conflict between government secrecy and the public’s right to be informed on matters of public interest, which ought to take priority? Is Julian Assange a journalist and what justifies his role as a journalist? Even if Julian Assange is a journalist of the new media, was he justified in disseminating classified information to the public? Who decides what is in “the public interest”? Is it only journalists of the Fourth Estate who decide that or also journalists of the Fifth Estate (new media)? This paper will answer the aforementioned questions by arguing that the media in the form of both the Fourth and Fifth Estates should inform the public on matters of public interest truthfully and ethically, even if sometimes they have to breach government secrecy.
The Right of Journalists Not to Disclose Their Sources and the New Media
This essay deals with the question of whether the right of journalists not to disclose their sources should be extended so as to cover the various ‘citizen journalists’ of the New Media. After expounding some jurisprudential attempts to confront this issue in the USA and after tracing the restrictive tendencies in the available instruments of the Council of Europe, we examine and then criticize a recent attempt to escape the problem through focusing on the ‘source’ rather than on the ‘journalist’. Returning back to the traditional context of the debate, in the last section of our essay we propose an enlargement of the traditional conception of the ‘journalist’, in order to provide protection to all persons who disseminate information to the general public through the use of New Media, on condition that these persons had the intent to do so (i.e. to disseminate information) already at the inception of the information-gathering process.
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 ...