WikiLeaks—a new tool to help improve the news media environment

The reading materials are bringing me back to the very time when my friends and I shared news on Chinese Facebook about the arrest of the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, out of anger and curious. We are so surprised that the America and the Europe want to put him into jail just for what WikiLeaks do about the Afghan War: In July, 2010, it released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public, which was a real big image-devastating to the America army. “What?! Really?! The symbol of freedom—the America starts to control as well?! What a big shock!” My friends and I are very confused that time. We all admire the courage of WikiLeaks. So, whether it is media or not, I firmly believe that WikiLeaks is totally under the protection of The First Amendment.

Then, in my eyes, WikiLeaks is not actually journalism. Firstly since it is clearly not run by journalists — and to a great extent relies on journalists at the New York Times, The Guardian and other news outlets to do the heavy lifting in terms of analysis of the documents it holds and distributes. Secondly, without it, we may not have the access to those eye-catching and shocking facts which serve a role of surveillance to help people make our living places a better place.

In other words, it is more like a new tool, and is a very important one. Like Mathew says: “WikiLeaks is at least an instrument of journalism. In other words, it is a part of the larger ecosystem of news media that has been developing with the advent of blogs, wikis, Twitter and all the other publishing tools we have now.” It is an important ways of getting us closer to the truth. The evidence is the word that Doug Saunders  — the European bureau chief for Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail — has noted, WikiLeaks is not that different from the brown envelope that the leaker behind the Watergate scandal delivered documents in, especially based on the Afghan War Diary. Therefore, here, I seem to find out the common points; again, it is the ethical dilemma thing we talked about a few days ago in class.