Periods of intense activity involving small dedicated teams working in close proximity have presaged the publication of fresh leaks. Again, this approach capitalizes on the affordances and the logics of digital media. Routine tasks of journalism can now be performed successfully and convincingly on the fly, far from the confines of the newsroom. Video and audio editing, the digital enhancement of images, and subtitling have all been carried out by WikiLeaks to a standard that matches and sometimes exceeds professional broadcast news and documentary.
COLLATERAL MURDER
The creation of the Collateral Murder film in early 2010 well illustrates how WikiLeaks has used digital tools to behave like a professional media production company. But the film also reveals WikiLeaks’ role as an activist cause group, eager to present its own version of events to try to set the news agenda. After acquiring the leaked video, Assange assembled a small team of colleagues in Iceland, where WikiLeaks had recently become well-known due to its leaking of a list of generous loans made to shareholders of the failed Icelandic banks of 2008. The editing and production tasks were carried out during a month-long house rental in Reykjavik. At this time, with the assistance of legal advisors and Icelandic activists, WikiLeaks was also lobbying the Icelandic legislature, business leaders, and telecommunications providers to support the establishment of the Modern Media Initiative, a legal settlement for media freedom and technological development on the island (Assange, 2011: 185–198; Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 5, para. 12).4
Those who joined Assange included Birgitta Jónsdóttir, MP for the newly formed Icelandic Movement Party; Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch online activist, businessman, and WikiLeaks donor; Smári McCarthy, a volunteer computer programmer; Kristinn Hrafnsson and Ingi Ragna Ingason, both television journalists; and Gudmundur Gudmundsson, an activist and experienced audio editor (Khatchadourian, 2010). Hrafnsson and Ragna Ingason traveled to Baghdad using their own money to interview eyewitnesses and conduct background research for the press package that accompanied the film’s release.
Collateral Murder reveals the strengths and weaknesses of WikiLeaks’ hybridity. Eager to make an immediate impression on professional news organizations, the team forensically analyzed and edited the raw video material, even to the extent of overlaying animated arrows highlighting key people and events. Assange directed the team, acting as a kind of program producer. They made fine-grained editorial decisions. For example, fragments of conversation were removed from the audio soundtrack during the opening, to avoid encouraging viewers to “make an emotional bond” with the helicopter pilots (Khatchadourian, 2010). They gave the film a highly provocative title designed to draw attention to the casual use of “collateral damage,” the military euphemism that has become common code for civilian injury and death. And they prefaced the footage with a quotation from George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Here was WikiLeaks acting something like a professional news organization, but one with a clear antiwar message. It had morphed from intermediary to committed news producer.
This created new dilemmas. Collateral Murder was a significant media intervention, one that free speech advocates across the globe were quick to praise. It brought global attention to the casual disregard for civilians’ lives and it graphically revealed the increasingly cool, detached nature of modern warfare, or at least how those with superior military power could see it that way. The leak derived from a credible source and unlike the other major leaks there were relatively few concerns that the film would jeopardize the safety of military personnel on the ground. There were also immediate reverberations across the U.S. media system. For example, Ethan McCord, the U.S. soldier caught on camera lifting the wounded children to safety, left the army and became a public figure after speaking out in support of the film on several television shows.
Yet the same forces shaping the production and publication of Collateral Murder also clouded its reception. Critics argued that the edited version decontextualized the events. Although the footage makes it clear that the pilots had mistaken a journalist’s long camera lens for a rocket-propelled grenade device, some of the men were in fact armed. (Reuters would later announce that it had changed its policy in order to forbid reporters from accompanying armed groups). These were U.S. military officers in a battle zone operating according to their training. Although it has been argued by Marjorie Cohn, a human rights lawyer, that the attack contravened several important principles of international law (2010), the pilots’ apparent relish for their grisly tasks, as revealed through their gung-ho language, was also framed as a reflection of the daily reality of warfare. But arguably the biggest problem was the obviously “packaged,” professional nature of the WikiLeaks release. Even though the raw footage was published in its entirety alongside the edited version and several damning moments from the full video were actually omitted from the shortened edit, Collateral Murder symbolizes WikiLeaks’ partial transformation from activist network and intermediary for whistle-blowers to ideologically committed documentary filmmaker. But this metamorphosis simultaneously threatened to undermine WikiLeaks as a legitimate journalistic enterprise. So from that point on, it adopted a different approach, one based on the profound interdependence of newer and older media logics.
Power and Interdependence
It is clear that from their very beginnings WikiLeaks planned to engage with professional media. In 2006 they asked Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistle-blower who had released the Vietnam war Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, to act as the “public face” of the new initiative (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 3, para. 55). Relations between WikiLeaks and some sections of the German press, such as Zeit Online and the business paper WirtschaftsWoche were cordial long before the big leaks of 2010 and there were also early links with the British press. For example, in November 2008 WikiLeaks published a report on post-election political killings among members of Kenya’s banned Mungiki sect. The story achieved greater impact through a temporary alliance with Jon Swain, a journalist at the Sunday Times. This collaboration was significant: Assange went on to win the 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award for his role (WikiLeaks, 2009b). WikiLeaks also tried various experiments to stoke interest in leaks. For example, in an early release of U.S. Army equipment lists the core team created an interactive searchable database that merged secret and freely available sources. They then issued detailed instructions to journalists on how to run reports against it (United States Army Counterintelligence Center, 2008).
Basic collaborative practices therefore started to emerge. WikiLeaks would provide the raw data to journalists, perhaps with some summaries and guidance about a leak’s most significant elements; the journalists would publish selective excerpts but link back to the full data on the WikiLeaks site. But this model did not become embedded as a consensual norm and this is significant in explaining WikiLeaks’ move toward a more integrated approach in 2010. Journalists quoting selectively and editors running stories without attribution were the subject of much concern and led to a sense of resentment about the hypercompetitive nature of contemporary news making. Some early experiences only heightened suspicions, such as when a journalist working for the German weekly magazine Stern covered a leak related to a Franco-German electronic toll road system without giving credit to WikiLeaks (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 4, para. 16).
Despite their initial policy of publishing all leaks in the order in which they were received, WikiLeaks gradually learned the importance of sifting out the data most likely to make an impact. They wanted to avoid becoming too dependent upon the professional media but they also wanted to prioritize leaks for preparation and publication (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 7, para. 2). It soon became clear that the mere publication of vast quantities of data did not by itself generate interest among professional journalists. WikiLeaks’ perspective on this is i
ntriguing and it suggests some ambivalence about their original goals and a further explanation of their switch to fully fledged collaboration with news organizations. According to Assange, the problem was one of oversupply. Journalists were swamped by too much data. The trick was to increase its value by restricting its quantity and then follow this up by collaborating more closely. This, it was believed, would generate greater interest, more manageable stories—and impact (Mey, 2010).
FROM THE NETWORK TO THE NEWSROOM
By the time of the Afghanistan release in summer 2010 WikiLeaks had decided that working closely with journalists would be its chief mode of operation. The core team “looked around for reliable partners” before settling on the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 15, para. 12). Der Spiegel journalists held weekly meetings with WikiLeaks staff during the run-up to the publication of the stories. Meetings with the Guardian and New York Times staff were also a regular feature by this time, as participants shuttled between London and New York. Assange worked for a time alongside the journalists at the Guardian’s London offices (Ellison, 2011). And as WikiLeaks’ strategy evolved they began to involve broadcasters: in the run-up to the “exclusive” launch of the Afghan war logs, Assange offered interviews to Channel 4, Al Jazeera, CNN, and a freelance reporter, much to the chagrin of the newspaper partners (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 8, para. 29).
By mid-2010, then, the relationship between WikiLeaks and professional media was symbiotic. But the precise nature of the power relations in this context of interdependence is a matter for further analysis and interpretation.
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and one of those directly involved in brokering the arrangement that led to the publication of the 2010 leaks, argues that the press were the unequivocal leaders throughout. Describing Assange as “a self-important quasi-anarchist,” Keller says that WikiLeaks was always treated as the outsider. In fact, so keen is he to depict the relationship in these traditional terms that, in a post-mortem describing the embassy cables release from the perspective of his editorial office, he pointedly and repeatedly refers to WikiLeaks as “a source.” As Keller puts it:
we have treated Julian Assange and his merry band as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: You don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not, and to make sense of it. That is what we did (Star & New York Times Staff, 2011: Ch. 1, para. 68).
The other major partner in the 2010 stories was the Guardian. Its attitude was very different. The paper had used WikiLeaks data early on. During 2009 the British high court upheld so-called superinjunctions preventing the Guardian from reporting on Barclays Bank’s alleged tax avoidance and oil trading company Trafigura’s alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. Superinjunctions forbid all media discussion of the injunctions they cover, so WikiLeaks agreed to host documents that British judges had ruled must be kept secret, undermining the court’s decision. These cases demonstrated that mainstream media organizations had much to gain from forming an alliance with a group of activists who were not shaped by the regular routines of the news industry and much less likely to capitulate when faced with legal threats. In March 2010 the Guardian offered to reciprocate on WikiLeaks’s role in the Trafigura affair by publicizing the Collateral Murder helicopter film (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 5, para. 16). In the event, WikiLeaks chose to launch at a high-profile press gathering at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. But the Guardian’s July 2010 publication of Afghanistan war documents is tellingly labeled a “Guardian/WikiLeaks publication” (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 9, para. 10). This was clearly seen as a collaborative endeavor.
It was the Guardian’s analysis of the predicament in which WikiLeaks found itself by mid-2010 that proved so important in shaping how the Afghanistan, Iraq, and embassy cables stories emerged. The newspaper’s leadership argued to Assange that WikiLeaks was becoming weaker because it was under threat of legal action, black propaganda campaigns, and hacking attacks. They suggested some sort of multinational alliance of newspapers, WikiLeaks, and NGOs. Fearful that the American embassy in London would seek a legal injunction from British courts before the stories emerged, the Guardian also suggested that the aim would be to publish simultaneously on the WikiLeaks site and across several outlets in a range of countries.
WikiLeaks too, were contributing to the strategy at this stage. They suggested that simultaneous publication by the New York Times, where they had some contacts, would make it less likely that the alleged U.S. military source of the leaks, Bradley Manning, would be charged under the U.S. Espionage Act (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 7, para. 47). And although the Guardian was initially reluctant to accede to WikiLeaks’ request that Der Spiegel be allowed into the Afghanistan collaboration, it soon became obvious that the Germans had a great deal of expertise that could be brought to bear in verifying the leaks, including access to secret supporting documents from the German Parliament’s investigation into the war (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 8, para. 18). The outcome was a historic international collaboration involving WikiLeaks and several elite national news organizations: the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País. The ultimate prize was the embassy cables leak of November 2010.
While it is clear that the publication of these enormous leaks was heavily dependent upon the professional and organizational resources of traditional news organizations, a key point here is that this pool of resources evolved rapidly during the collaboration.
A custom search engine was coded by the Guardian’s in-house technology staff, enabling its foreign affairs team to run queries against the huge cables database of around three hundred million words of jargon-riddled text. An editorial decision was made to redact material that might endanger sources and military personnel, but deciding this was the easy part; following through, when faced with such huge amounts of textual data, proved far more difficult. The embassy cables were the equivalent of around two thousand printed books (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 11, para. 20).
Suspicion and differences of opinion bedeviled all involved. The journalists had several concerns: the status and credibility of the leaks, the possibility that the U.S. government and private individuals named in leaks might bring lawsuits against the editors of the European newspapers, the potential harm that might come to informants inadvertently named in secret documents, and Assange’s claim to act as the sole intermediary between “his” sources and the media. The legal concerns were particularly acute with the embassy cables because these contained numerous descriptions of financial corruption involving not only politicians but also business leaders from around the world. In the British context, where high court injunctions have become more common in recent years, it was possible that some of these individuals might succeed in restricting publication before any of the stories saw the light of day. There was therefore a “safety in numbers” approach girded by simultaneous international publication, the linchpin of which was WikiLeaks’ online publishing infrastructure.
The Guardian’s and the New York Times’ accounts of the 2010–2011 period both stress Assange’s unpredictable behavior but also his desire to avoid becoming too dependent upon a narrow group of professional media actors. There were undoubtedly conflicting norms. With the Afghanistan documents, for example, WikiLeaks wanted to share the data more widely, including among known sympathetic freelancers. The Guardian and the New York Times wanted to retain exclusivity (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 15, para. 16). The Guardian’s Nick Davies said of Assange: “The problem is he’s bas
ically a computer hacker. He comes from a simplistic ideology, or at that stage he did, that all information has to be published, that all information is good” (quoted in Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 8, para. 24).
For its part, WikiLeaks was eager to ensure that the usual journalistic norms for reporting insider information from government sources would not apply in the case of such enormous leaks, particularly in America. They had mixed results with this request. The New York Times, in a plan to avoid charges of unethical reporting, decided to inform the U.S. State Department before proceeding with each new set of revelations. This decision was made on the grounds that it would enable journalists to use reactions from officials to gain a better sense of the authenticity of the WikiLeaks documents. It would also enable them to identify the redactions necessary to safeguard U.S. informants and military personnel (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 14, para. 59). In its coverage, the New York Times exercised a cautious approach to redaction and it refused to link to WikiLeaks because it claimed the site contained sensitive information (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 8, para. 29). Bill Keller warned the White House of his plans in advance of the launch of the cable stories and four of his staff attended an off-the-record meeting with officials from the White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The U.S. administration demanded that sources on the ground be protected but they also insisted that secret U.S. intelligence operations and any potentially embarrassing remarks made by top U.S. officials should be removed from the articles. Keller agreed to redact to protect on-the-ground sources but was “unpersuaded” by the other arguments. However, this initial meeting between journalists at the New York Times and the U.S. State Department was followed by a regular series of daily conference calls and ad hoc gatherings to discuss the content of forthcoming stories. The White House did not seek to prevent publication. As Keller says, “in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The Secretaries of State and Defense and the Attorney General resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing” (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 11, para. 64) The U.S. military and intelligence authorities, working through the “usual channels,” therefore played an important role in shaping how the cables stories were handled at the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Guardian and the other press partners also indirectly considered State Department responses when deciding what to redact, because Keller and his team in New York constantly fed information across from their briefing meetings (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 14, para. 46).
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