Is Wikileaks challenging the paradigm of journalism? Boundary work and beyond

Abstract

WikiLeaks exists in a peculiar and illustrative tension with journalism that dramatizes larger unfolding debates about the authority, status, and future of journalism. This article explores what the WikiLeaks saga can tell us, in a broader sense, about pressing anxieties of the journalism profession and, relatedly, the discipline of journalism studies. The article explores how journalists and journalism scholars have discussed the revelations of WikiLeaks as well as the organization itself. I suggest that, whereas some observers have argued that WikiLeaks heralds a radical transformation in understandings of journalism, others are keen to see it as just another source—a phenomenon easily subsumed under existing definitions of journalism and deployed in its service. The article investigates the ways in which WikiLeaks challenges conventional paradigms of news coverage insofar as it provides—and publishes—the investigative materials that journalists themselves usually take pride in uncovering. Through this activity, the organization’s emergence reflects larger developments representing a shake-up in conventional hierarchies of voice and access to the public sphere. At the same time, WikiLeaks has also served as a novel and unique type of news source, and the ambiguous figure of Julian Assange has been variously appropriated in news narratives as a heroic defender of free expression—described as a courageous whistleblower willing to speak truth to power on the one hand, and an autistic renegade, recluse, and alleged rapist on the other (e.g., Rusbridger, 2011, p. 6). These conflicting and ever-evolving accounts of the organization and its shape-shifting front man coexist in media coverage and scholarly debates and reflect a more profound set of questions about the changing nature of journalism and, hence, the need to refine understandings of the profession and our conceptual tools for studying it.

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