cablegate and wikileaks revisited_väliverronen_newmedialit_bratislava, slovakia

Cablegate and WikiLeaks Revisited How the Leaks Were Reported and What Journalists Thought about Them in the UK, Sweden and Finland

Leonardo da Vinci Project 2012-2014:New Media Literacy for Media Professionals

Partners: SKAMBA (SK), Media21Foundation (BG), FOPSIM (MT) and Videovest (RO).

This presentation was prepared by SKAMBA and is free to use under condition of acknowledging autorship

Jari VäliverronenUniversity of Tampere, Finland

What is WikiLeaks?




Established: 2006Founder: Julian AssangeDescription: ”not-for-profit media organisation”Goal: ”to bring important news and information to the public”Important releases: Collateral Murder, war logs, Cablegate

What was Cablegate?




PIC: ELTIEMPO.COM

”Largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain”

Size: 251,287 leaked US embassy cables (1966–2010)Release start: 28/11/2010Media partners: The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País (+about 60 other outlets)

”The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”- Bill Keller, The New York Times




Media: Assange to blame for end of co-operation

The only reason?

Falling out with people

is what he does.

PIC: ESPEN MOE

Framework: Different Structures




WikiLeaks JournalismEthical grounding

Hackerism, hacker ethics

Journalistic ethics

Organizational structure

Networked, decentralized

Institutional, hierarchic

Modus operandi Not-for-profit Commercial

Preferred ties to outside actors

Strong Weak

Research in Numbers




The UK Sweden Finland Total

Stories 399 120 237 1,00134 129 82

Inter-views

3 2 3 121 activist 1 2

Reporting 1: Positive Start




Wikileaks is an idealistic journalistic organisation created to ensure our freedom of expression… (A)

Wikileaks is the guerrilla front in a global movement for greater transparency and participation. (G)

Wikileaks is a source, often a first-class one, and its information shall be subjected to the same evaluation as anything else we publish. (DN)

Is WL’s use of news media to publish cables just a media strategy? […] Surely we’d have liked WL’s editor to answer that? (A)

He (Assange) is clearly in some sense a publisher and journalist as well as a source. (G)

Reporting 2: Problems Arise




[Assange’s arrest] is not a result of Wikileaks’s latest publications. Him sitting in a jail in the UK has nothing do with the publication of the secret cables. (DN)

Of course JA is an odd guy with an unclear agenda. He has to be evaluated like his material. Journalists are used to that and can do it. (A)

(op-ed to Assange) Your halo is dimming badly. UK papers have disclosed details about your violent machismo towards women who adore you. You are ruining your reputation as well as Wikileaks’s credibility. (IL)

WL is so reliant on his leadership that there is no natural replacement. […] WL’s inability to accept new material is drawing criticism from others in the wider global transparency movement… (G)

Reporting 3: Few Effects?




I dare to claim that anyone reading Helsingin Sanomat has already obtained a more nuanced understanding [of Finland’s relations to Nato] than the recently published American cables now present. (HS)

Wikileaks’s embassy cables were hardly ”the big revelation” à la Pentagon Papers. (DN)

In the case of WikiLeaks it was journalism that censored vulnerable names and sources from what the state dept. was widely disseminating. It was journalism that mediated and interpreted the raw data. […] So thank goodness for journalism. (G)

In particular, countries with repressive governments and without a free press have a great hunger to read what their rulers have been saying and doing. We should not sneer at the opportunity these cables offer. (G)

Interviews 1: WikiLeaks Now?




I’m writing a book now and constantly use WikiLeaks, just this material. I go to Nicaragua and Bangladesh and check what they [WL] have online. And I’ve noticed that other media, and in fact some books I’ve read, have begun to use the cables as source material. So their value is a lot bigger than the few days’ fighting over scoops. – Foreign desk editor, Helsingin Sanomat

I don’t think we would rule out any given group, if they’ve got good information and we can hit an agreement. […] It’s always, because it’s the easier bit to see, I think the Guardian-WikiLeaks thing is always put down as a personality clash. But it was actually pretty serious issues behind it, to do with attitude towards redaction, towards things like Belarus. There were some quite grave issues that essentially just led to a complete breakdown of trust. […] So, whether we’d work with WikiLeaks again, I suspect no. But I don’t think they’re offering [laughs]. – Journalist, The Guardian

Interviews 2: Need for Change




It’s essentially about the nature of the information. That’s the point I’m trying to get across. Because we now live in a world of electronic data, it becomes possible for people to compile these gigantic accumulations of data and to structure them. And then, they will one way or another get leaked, and it’s then possible to process them. And we’re learning how to process them as journalists. – Senior editor, Guardian

The whole business about internet security, if you like, I think is an ultimately doomed fantasy. The solution […] to increase security, what you do is you, you’re low-tech, you step right down. You meet a person in the bushes. You leave a document in a dead drop location. You don’t.. There is no way you can communicate electronically and be secure, end of the story. – Senior editor, Guardian

Interviews 3: National Observations




We must be much more careful, both foreign and domestic news reporters, because everything we do is always judged online. We can no longer be unsure of facts, which I’m sure happened in the past. You can’t do that – if you do you’ll be analyzed to bits, called an idiot online, and you’ll get loads of emails. And in foreign reporting, you have to act in every case as if these people [your informants] lived in Sweden and protect them accordingly. – Foreign news reporter, Aftonbladet

We’re really in the backwoods in Finland if you think about data journalism. […] We’re humanists, most of us, so we can’t really do statistics or know it well enough. […] I’ve been following what newsrooms do in the Nordic countries and in Europe, and we still have a long way to go, but we’re making progress little by little. – Investigative reporter, YLE (Finnish public service broadcaster)

Future Considerations




Key issues for journalism in the future:

1. (Re-)defining relationship to powers-that-be2. (Re-)defining relationship to co-operation with

non-professional actors (i.e. journalistic autonomy)

3. (Re-)defining relationship to technology




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cablegate and wikileaks revisited_väliverronen_newmedialit_bratislava, slovakia

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