In mid-April, people surfing the Internet were able to witness a gruesome wartime killing. Swedish website Wikileaks posted a graphic videotape of an American Apache helicopter gunning down several men in a Baghdad neighborhood. The story received more than 2 million YouTube views in two days.
The Americans mistook the cameras held by Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, for weapons and opened fire on the group, believing them to be insurgents. Following the initial assault the Apache also fired on a minivan picking up the wounded, in which two children were sitting. Twelve people were killed and the children were injured.
The principle of Wikileaks, founded in 2006, is to place leaked information online without comment, but to also have the website team verify that material is correct and, in some cases, prepare after-the-fact reports on stories. Wikileaks is funded by private donors and rejects state or corporate funding.
An article on Wikileaks appeared in Foreign Policy magazine recently, under the heading, “Is this the future of journalism?” The author, Jonathan Stray, wrote that the “diffuse, international nature of the organization has protected Wikileaks from the fate of other organizations that seek to expose wrongdoing by powerful interests. It prints no paper, but instead stores its articles online in Sweden, where journalists are required by law not to reveal sources. Its domain name… is registered in California, where the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened when an aggrieved Swiss bank tried shut the site down.”
Is Wikileaks journalism’s future? Stray doesn’t quite say, but he suggests that the website offers a new model for freer media. “Wikileaks’ disregard for gag orders and their unabashed advocacy makes full-throated praise for the organization rare,” he writes. “Yet no journalist I’ve spoken to will speak ill of Wikileaks in private: Every reporter understands that Wikileaks is the thin end of the wedge. If they can’t run a dangerous story, no one can.”
Perhaps Stray is right. But we should place Wikileaks in a broader context of media expansion in the past decade. Unmediated media have thrived in recent years, starting with blogs, but also including Twitter, YouTube, and SMS messages used to disseminate information that governments censor. Wikileaks is a fresh facet of this trend, but, conceptually, it is not a radical departure from YouTube.
Where Wikileaks is interesting is that although it shuns mediation — whether in its funding or dissemination — in many respects it is more reliant on mediation than other new-style media. The United States helicopter attack was made available by someone who had access to a classified videotape, which the Pentagon had refused to release to mainstream outlets under the Freedom of Information Act. Wikileaks is dependent on the agenda of whistleblowers, and unlike more traditional news outlets, its method of posting with minimal comment means it has less latitude to cover itself against manipulation by leakers.
But where Stray’s question is relevant is in terms of the market. The trend in media toward unmediated posting is a phenomenon that is here to stay, because the market, bolstered by new technology, has created a demand for news that stays unfiltered by large institutions, no matter how liberal they might be. If people can read and express unedited views, that erodes the gatekeeper role of traditional media. But it also erodes the capacity of the state and embarrassed institutions to shape how stories come out.
When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he and the newspaper bore the brunt of government wrath and legal retribution. The US government lost. Today, it is even harder, both legally and politically, for governments to silence Wikileaks.
Anonymous whistleblowers can hide behind such sites, which use the complexity of markets, access to multiple protective legislations and innovative technologies to stay one step ahead of cumbersome bureaucracies trying to conceal inconvenient truths. That doesn’t mean that leaked information isn’t sometimes tendentious, but it does mean that secrets can reach the marketplace before anyone can press a delete button. Malfeasance or brutality may be reduced as a consequence.
