Abstract
Although Wikileaks was founded in 2006 as an online site for whistle-blowers to disclose information anonymously to Wikileaks and for that information to be published once vetted by Wikileaks volunteers, the essays in this fantastic book focus on the very high profile leaks in 2010 (Collateral Murder, Afghan War Logs, Iraq War Logs, Cablegate). As well as providing detailed accounts of this year of leaks, the authors seek to set these leaks in the context of transformations in media and political systems to assess the broader significance of Wikileaks. The first five chapters assess the complex, complementary and antagonistic relationship between Wikileaks and journalism, establishing Wikileaks as part of the ‘networked fourth estate’ made up of a variety of traditional but now online media and new entrants (amongst others: news aggregators, not-for-profits, individual bloggers). The next five examine the relationship between Wikileaks and state power. The remaining five chapters investigate Wikileaks as a type of media activism and assess its links with social movements (particularly during the Arab Spring). The editors have assembled a starry cast of contributors from within academia and beyond (journalists, lawyers, media activists, hackers, politicians) and from a diverse number of fields beyond media studies (Yochai Benkler, Slavoj Žižek).
A naïve utopian view of the networked fourth estate is that because of the greater multiplicity of media actors, greater diversity of viewpoint and greater ease of networked media production and reception the fourth estate must surely be better at holding economically and politically powerful actors to account. It is not at all clear what the answer is to this question but it is, at least, necessary to consider the weaknesses in this oft-repeated and falsely reassuring argument. Brevini and Murdock, drawing on a famous Deep Throat line in All the President’s Men, ‘follow the money’ or to put it differently examine how powerful agents and institutions react when faced with ‘counter-powers’ such as Wikileaks. The state pursues the leakers seeking to punish them through civil and military courts while engaging in propaganda exercises in the media. It encourages commercial firms to cut off services to the leakers to starve them of storage space and funding. The state apparatus and that of commerce as well are turned against actually a rather small, poorly funded outfit which has to rely on or ‘partner’ traditional media to analyse and interpret the contents of the leaks, legitimate the leaks themselves, and promote them to a broad audience. Not only are traditional media part of the ‘establishment’ but are subject to the discipline of political and economic power. In addition, it is fair to say that they are facing a structural crisis of revenue generation in the networked fourth estate that has seen cutbacks particularly in investigative journalism. The institutions of the networked fourth estate continue to look rather feeble in contrast to the holders of economic and political power despite the ‘democratization’ of leaking in the digital age.