Abstract
Making sensitive or even secret information public was hitherto the domain of investigative journalism. WikiLeaks has made it possible for whistle-blowers to shed light on anything they think the general public should know about. This has given birth to a new breed of journalism. The new way of bringing sensitive information to the public is much less responsible in many respects, even though it can by some measures fulfil the norm of fairness. Who are the affected parties and what are the pros and cons? These are the questions this article seeks to answer by comparing WikiLeaks with classic journalism.
When WikiLeaks had its famous scoop, publishing hundreds of thousands of documents about the Afghan War, everybody in the general public and especially among professionals and academics felt that something new had happened in the public sphere and in the field of media reporting. There had been leaks and whistle-blowers before, but never before had such a huge cache of secret documents been leaked to the news media. It was not only the sheer number of documents which were an innovation but also the way they made their way into the media. The discussion which started immediately after the WikiLeaks publications became even more heated when the government of the United States named the central person behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, a high-tech terrorist and when he became the object of an international legal procedure, being accused of rape in Sweden.
It is obvious that the procedures around this lawsuit, still ongoing as this article is being written, cannot be the subject of a discussion dealing with WikiLeaks and the issues of the media, journalism and the public sphere it raises. It is obvious as well that the phenomenon WikiLeaks cannot be dealt with within the framework of the media in a given country. It is a global phenomenon, although many different countries are affected in many different ways. Given the global reach and range of access to WikiLeaks, it is a global public sphere which should be the frame of reference for asking ethical questions about the claims and the effects of WikiLeaks. The fact that a similar website (OpenLeaks.org) went online at the end of January 2011, and that this fact was announced previously on another site which posts assumed secret documents (Cryptome.org) which is in turn a companion site to Cartome.org, shows that WikiLeaks is just the beginning or the symbol for the emergence of other revealers of sources which will become ubiquitous. Further examples such as BrusselsLeaks.com, Balkanleaks.eu or Wikispooks.com show that this development is already under way.
To ask about the implications of WikiLeaks for freedom of speech, media ethics and democracy is to ask questions of responsibility. Responsibility is a central notion of ethics and of media ethics as well. It includes six dimensions which will be discussed in this article. These dimensions are (1) the actor, who is responsible because of (2) his action, by which (3) persons concerned are affected and because of (4) the consequences the action has. Responsibility is judged by an (5) authority and is weighed against the background of certain (6) norms and values [1]. To raise the question of responsibility is to ask about these dimensions.
The answers are not as obvious as they seem to be, given the global range of WikiLeaks. Asking about the actor, namely, who is responsible, seems to be relatively easy. We can look at how the media promote the founder of WikiLeaks as the head of the site and consider that the Attorney General of the US has tried to file charges against him. But WikiLeaks could not function if there were no whistle-blowers leaking documents to the site, no volunteers who work for WikiLeaks checking the documents’ veracity and, last but not least, without the news media that collaborate with WikiLeaks, sometimes on an exclusive basis, as did, for example, the German news magazine Spiegel [4]. 1 Depending on which actor is chosen as the starting point, the answers to the following questions will be different.
The Guardian, which received the war diaries on an exclusive basis as well, handled the documents much more openly, sharing them with other media.
Let us stay with WikiLeaks as an organisation. What then is the action that is to blame? WikiLeaks—as it states on its website—‘bring[s] important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists’ [10]. This is at first sight not different from what every serious working journalist intends to do. We understand journalism, bringing news and information to the general public, as being a central and valuable function in a democracy, allowing the electorate to make up its mind about issues important to the public sphere. The main goal of WikiLeaks then is to publish original source material. Again, this is not so different from what journalism intends to do—provided it disposes of enough resources in terms of workforce and technical means. Already before WikiLeaks there were specialised journalists who researched and investigated databases in order to exploit original sources. But only a few wealthy media groups were able to finance such a rarified form of journalism.
The difference from WikiLeaks is thus twofold: First, WikiLeaks only provides the raw material without the traditional work of journalists who select, arrange and comment on the material they have found. Second, WikiLeaks is in principle accessible to the whole range of media, hence allowing broadcasters or newspapers with small budgets to search its site and find material and sources.
But here some objections can be made. The most important is about the character of the leaked information. Among the material recently published on WikiLeaks were embassy cables with classified profiles of foreign politicians. Apart from the descriptions, which were simply a reflection of what the critical press in some countries was saying about its politicians, there were substantial evaluations as well which shed light on what the US diplomatic corps is thinking about some of their allies or partners. Here, publication can be described as a breach of trust. Those who leaked this information disclosed the content of communication which was supposed to be restricted to a limited sphere to WikiLeaks, knowing that the material would enter the general public sphere. A communication works on the principle that the sender intends the content to be transmitted to a defined receiver. A private encounter is something different from a fireside chat, which is again different from a press conference or a newscast. It is an unwritten journalistic rule that information is classified as from a source to be used only as background information, as from a quote by a so-called informed source or as from a quote from a named source. This differentiation about specific content and its addressee is blurred by the publication on WikiLeaks. On the other hand, traditional journalistic investigation sometimes infringes on privacy and it is only the sound judgement of journalists and their news media which decides if publishing such material can be legitimate and on what grounds. WikiLeaks has not so far seemed to make such ethical decisions—they simply leave it to the journalists. Although the material on WikiLeaks usually needs to be interpreted by journalists in order to be understandable for the general public, it is—once published—out in the open for public scrutiny.
Another objection to the legitimacy of WikiLeaks actions is that the publications mostly concern the US, implying that the website is being partial. It is indeed the case that the most spectacular revelations—the Afghan War Diary [6] and the video on ‘collateral murder’ in Iraq [7]—were crucial to the US. However, there had been publications on undemocratic African regimes [3], background on the German Love Parade disaster in Duisburg [8] and the bankruptcy of the Icelandic Kaupthing Bank [9]. We can argue that it is no surprise that the nation most often the subject of the international news occupies as well a dominant place in the activities of whistle-blowers and thus among the material for WikiLeaks. So there is nothing substantially new about the actions of WikiLeaks in comparison with traditional journalism. The organisers of the site face the same ethical challenges with one big difference: they do not belong to the profession of journalists who have a long tradition of developing a professional ethos and the ethical infrastructure of media accountability such as, for example, the press councils which try to maintain ethical standards in journalism.
The question about the consequences of an action is closely linked to the question about who the persons affected are, and it is crucial when asking for the ethical dimension of an action. These consequences in the WikiLeaks case are of course dependent on the sort of publications being published; possible consequences dominated the public discussion about WikiLeaks. The German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger regards the consequences of publishing the cables describing foreign politicians as disastrous for diplomacy as a whole. If diplomats communicating with their foreign ministry have to fear leaks, they will be much more close-lipped than before [2]. The long-term consequence of the publications of those cables would be that finally there would be not more but less transparency because of the resulting changes in diplomacy.
A different perspective and another line of argument are relevant in the case of the Afghan War Diary or the video on ‘collateral murder’. Here the consequence was that the general public got some insight into the dirty side of a war which had been presented by the US as a clean war, causing no human harm. With regard to the Duisburg Love Parade 2010 planning documents, journalists could track the preparations for this event, which ended in an awful disaster. Documents about the private treasure of African dictators were more than uncomfortable for the concerned persons but they were of great help to the journalists of the countries in question, allowing them to inform their publics about the discrepancies between the speeches and deeds of these rulers.
Thus, in the given examples we find parties who do not want their actions to be exposed to the general public because they will probably be perceived by the general public in a negative light.
On the other hand we can generalise that the consequence of nearly all WikiLeaks publications has been more transparency on political and economic processes and procedures. And those who are affected by this greater transparency are the participants in the democratic public sphere.
It is a long-standing tradition in democratic states that the public's right to know is a fundamental element in the political structure of a state or nation. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is a famous example of the high value of this right, Article Five of the German Basic Law has been defended in many legal proceedings and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows that the right to information is a principle which is valuable as well to the international community:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontier [emphasis added].
The impetus behind this right to know is the long-standing struggle against state secrecy and the claim that the citizenry has a right to information, and not just if politicians want to publish it, but is also due to the insights of democratic institutions. Until now, the possibility to exercise this right has been bound to the capacity and competence of the media and its journalists to investigate, poke into hidden deals and gather data. WikiLeaks has expanded these possibilities and brought a new quality to information freedom.
Of course, this fundamental right to know is restricted in most constitutions by the given media laws which uphold the importance of privacy, youth protection laws and the need to keep secret information that would harm the security of the state. This is the legal side of the issue, and it has not been proved until now that WikiLeaks has infringed on these laws.
On the ethical side, norms and values which are embedded in the journalistic ethos have long since provided a corrective by which journalism itself balances its freedom with responsibility. Now, we cannot categorise WikiLeaks as journalism, as it lacks certain important functions characterising this profession. But we can call it a pre- or semi-journalistic institution, since it is—by virtue of the fact that it provides information—part of the journalistic spectrum. In this perspective it is legitimate to use journalistic norms as a touchstone for asking which norms and values might have been violated.
In all journalistic or press codes we can identify five fundamental norms which comprise the core of the journalistic ethos and make journalists work responsibly: fairness and accuracy, protection of sources, protection of privacy, the use of fair methods of reporting and avoidance of conflict of interest [5]. These norms are not easily convertible into prescriptions. They always have to be balanced against the relevance and importance of a publication when they are violated. Applying these norms to the practices of WikiLeaks we can make the following observations:
WikiLeaks seems to fulfil the norm of fairness and accuracy, as it provides a refined mechanism to prove the veracity of the leaked documents. Protection of sources is an absolute principle for the site and so far there has been no known case where the anonymity and security of the whistle-blowers were not maintained. With regard to the protection of privacy, it could be argued that in the case of the diplomatic cables this norm was violated. But here the violation of the norm might be legitimate if the resulting publication is of public relevance. The charge of violation of the norm to use fair methods of reporting can of course be made in nearly every case of whistle-blowing, as whistle-blowers are not supposed to communicate internal issues to the outside. But as they are in a very different role from that of a journalist, this is another ethical field than that of journalism. WikiLeaks only receives the documents in question. No one would blame a journalist for using documents which had been leaked to him or her. Avoidance of conflict of interest, finally, does not seem to be a relevant category to apply to WikiLeaks, although some would make the argument based on the personality of Julian Assange, who is accused of using WikiLeaks to enhance his personal celebrity. But this argument does not apply to the broader organisation that runs WikiLeaks (or similar websites).
The last of the above-mentioned ethical questions, which authority can enforce responsibility, is perhaps the most difficult one. Let us use again the example of journalism. Within the professional field of journalism, press councils have been an important but not always effective means by which the maintenance of the journalistic ethos is inculcated and preserved. Press councils are the authorities before which journalists violating professional norms can be held accountable. There is no similar authority which can hold WikiLeaks accountable. Moreover, WikiLeaks refuses any responsibility except for the veracity of the documents and the security of the sources. Its principle is transparency—not for its own organisation, a fact which is criticised heavily—without regard for the consequences. It is obvious that WikiLeaks selects which leaked information it will make public, but the criteria of this selection have remained obscure until now, and it remains to be seen if WikiLeaks and similar institutions will develop their own ethical code for giving a platform to whistle-blowers. Whatever this ethical code, if it does emerge, will look like, it will be confronted with the problem of any ethical decision-making code: to find a balance between two competing values.
Apart from this, it is still the media and the journalists, the gatekeepers making WikiLeaks publications understandable to the general public, who bear an important part of the responsibility for publishing WikiLeaks information.