Wikileaks and the Battle for the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate

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  • Article: A FREE IRRESPONSIBLE PRESS: WIKILEAKS AND THE BATTLE OVER THE SOUL OF THE NETWORKED

FOURTH ESTATE. Yochai Benkler.

URL = http://benkler.org/Benkler_Wikileaks_current.pdf

WORKING DRAFT for forthcoming Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review


Excerpt

First paragraph:

"Wikileaks was born a century after President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the speech that gave muckraking journalism its name, and both hailed investigative journalism and called upon it to be undertaken responsibly. Four years after its first document release, in 2010, Wikileaks became the center of an international storm surrounding the role of the individual in the networked public sphere.

It forces us to ask us how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. The freedom that the Internet provides to networked individuals and cooperative associations to speak their minds and organize around their causes has been deployed over the past decade to develop new networked models of the fourth estate. These models circumvent the social and organizational frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the balance between freedom and responsibility of the press. At the same time, the Wikileaks episode forces us to confront the fact that the members of the networked fourth estate turn out to be both more susceptible to new forms of attack than those of the old, and to possess different sources of resilience in the face of these attacks. In particular, commercial owners of the critical infrastructures of the networked environment can deny service to controversial speakers, and some appear to be willing to do so at a mere whiff of public controversy. The United States government, in turn, can use this vulnerability to bring to bear new kinds of pressure on undesired disclosures in extralegal partnership with these private infrastructure providers."