Abstract
Charlie Beckett and James Ball’s WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era adds to the growing number of journalistic and academic texts on the whistle-blowing website and media organization WikiLeaks. It is part journalistic account of WikiLeaks’ history and part scholarly analysis of its implications for mainstream journalism, but is more successful at the former than the latter. The book is written to have broad appeal and in this respect it provides an engrossing read. It is not intended for an academic audience but it would be useful for scholars who are new to and interested in the issues and dynamics of WikiLeaks and journalism practices. Beckett is a former journalist and the current director of POLIS, a media think-tank at the London School of Economics. Ball is a journalist at the Guardian newspaper and one-time data analyst at WikiLeaks.
The bold claim ‘WikiLeaks is the most challenging journalism phenomenon to emerge in the digital era’ (p. 1) introduces the book, but the concept of networked news is at the core of their argument. Beckett (2008) has written previously about the emerging concept of networked journalism in his book SuperMedia: Saving Journalism so It Can Save the World. For the authors, the main question is not whether WikiLeaks does journalism (the authors believe it does), but what journalism is becoming and WikiLeaks’ place in this environment. These are interesting ideas that would benefit from a deeper level of analysis and more robust empirical connections. Structurally, the book is organized into four chapters. Each chapter provides a chronological history of the WikiLeaks organization and its meaning at particular points in time. There is an emphasis on the authors’ view of its challenge to both media and political power and also on the challenges that WikiLeaks faced as a disruptive journalistic phenomenon.
In Chapter One, Beckett and Ball argue the initial phase of WikiLeaks saw it evolve from an open-source participatory publisher of whistle-blower documents to a hybrid form of alternative media. The chapter covers the early history of WikiLeaks, from its emergence in late 2006 to the release of the Collateral Murder video in April 2010. The authors attempt to ground WikiLeaks in the practices of ‘hacktivism’ (p. 16), but their cursory consideration of this area lends little analytical value to the book. There is a missed opportunity to explore the influence of the philosophical foundations and cultural ethics of software hacking as it developed in the computer labs of MIT and Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s. During this first phase of WikiLeaks’ existence, the authors suggest it developed a stricter editorial control of its product culminating in the edited video of Collateral Murder. By discussing some of the significant leaks, they seek to present how WikiLeaks was a challenge to both alternative and mainstream media and government power. The book is not wholly successful in demonstrating the challenge to alternative media, in part, because alternative media is a broad category and difficult to define. The authors rely on the ultimately unhelpful definition of alternative media as being anything that diverges from mainstream media (p. 27).
WikiLeaks’ challenge to mainstream media is more apparent and cogently argued. Economic restrictions and editorial competition from emerging forms of digital, citizen- generated journalism provide the basis for the authors’ central argument in the book; that WikiLeaks is part of a broader shift in the changing nature of journalism, from a product-based hierarchical mass structure, to a process-based networked system. What distinguishes WikiLeaks from mainstream media for the authors in these early years is the ability to exploit its ‘stateless’ nature (Rosen, 2010). Indeed, the authors suggest that WikiLeaks has been more a legal revolution in media than a technological one (p. 3). Operating without a permanent location or formalized structure, the WikiLeaks organization has withstood legal challenges to its publishing model, although it has suffered from financial and commercial sanctions.
In Chapter Two, Beckett and Ball argue that the unprecedented scale of the release of the US military war logs and diplomatic cables, and WikiLeaks’ collaboration with mainstream media outlets, such as The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, produced an ‘astoundingly successful series of acts of journalism’ (p. 47) but highlighted the ‘mismatch of principles, practice and purpose’ (p. 47). The authors demonstrate how WikiLeaks was networked into mainstream journalism through its complex and, at times, uneasy collaboration with legacy media organizations. The arrangement allowed WikiLeaks to expand its audience and to draw upon the professional resources of its partners. Importantly, it provided a multi-jurisdictional publishing structure that could mitigate individual state attempts at censorship. The networked collaboration raised important questions regarding the responsibility of journalism to hold power to account, to tell the truth, and to avoid harm (pp. 69–82). The privileges enjoyed by mainstream media in terms of access to power can ‘inhibit independence and a risk-taking critical approach’ (p. 78). The publication of the war logs and diplomatic cables ‘exposed the limits of some conventional media in holding power to account’ (p. 80).
The authors argue that where previously WikiLeaks had been relieved of mainstream media’s reconciliation of privilege and responsibilities, the new collaboration forced WikiLeaks to integrate journalistic practices of verification (notwithstanding the Collateral Murder video) and redaction. They criticize WikiLeaks’ ‘informal’ (p. 73) method of validating documents that ignores the ‘wider responsibility to objectivity and context’ (p. 73). One of the most problematic areas of WikiLeaks for Beckett and Ball has been its lack of organizational transparency and accountability: ‘It criticizes governments and mainstream media for their lack of openness. It claims to be a transparency organization but it is not fully transparent itself. It is arguable that WikiLeaks should be more, not less, accountable than those it critiques’ (p. 82). They warn that failure to do so will result in a lack of credibility, public support and editorial sustainability.
Chapter Three places WikiLeaks within the struggle for an open internet and engages in wider discussion regarding the issues of freedom and control in the digital era. The extra-legal attacks on WikiLeaks’ technical infrastructure by Amazon, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard and others after the ‘Cablegate’ disclosures, underscore the concern that indirect corporate actions threaten unrestricted digital communications as much as government censorship (p. 94). As New York University’s (NYU’s) Clay Shirky (2011) surmised, these actions reminded us that the ‘Internet is not in fact largely a public sphere, it’s a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech’. Yet WikiLeaks was able to move hosting providers and be successfully mirrored on a number of other websites. Beckett and Ball identify two obstacles to WikiLeaks’ success and the replication of its model in closed countries such as China and Iran (p. 114). First, the very restrictive control of internet architecture impedes the ability of leakers to provide information, and of websites, such as WikiLeaks, to avoid censorship. Second, the absence of independent mainstream media to disseminate stories reduces their impact and lasting significance.
The final chapter discusses the inherent instability of disruptive journalistic ventures such as WikiLeaks. It presents the use of social media in the Arab Spring as evidence of alternative forms of political communication that compare with WikiLeaks. The argument is unconvincing, primarily because these networks were not collecting and publishing restricted documents. They were not dependent on whistle-blower sources. However, the authors do illustrate the value of social media’s decentralized and networked capacity to facilitate and coordinate collective action that challenges power. The future of WikiLeaks is uncertain. For Beckett and Ball, WikiLeaks’ challenge to power rests on its ability to connect to established mainstream media organizations. In their news media ecology, legacy media retains its primary importance.
WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era provides a well-written and interesting account of WikiLeaks’ history. It is less satisfying on a theoretical and conceptual level, as it does not enlist media theory in understanding the philosophical dimensions of networked news or in assessing the differences in the journalism practised by WikiLeaks and mainstream media organizations. The book does deliver a stimulating generalist introduction to WikiLeaks as a journalistic endeavour and will also engage readers who are interested in questions of journalism’s future without expecting ready answers.