Case study: WikiLeaks: Challenge or endowment to journalism

Abstract

The world fame WikiLeaks has obtained in the previous months requires a scientific investigation of this phenomenon and the establishment of the essential parameters for the influence this sort of journalism has on the mainstream and on online journalism. After the polemics about defining WikiLeaks as an organization that engages in research journalism or as information disseminator, or a media tool, this paper also offers an account of the following questions - how much of original media contents WikiLeaks offers, as well as what guarantees the authenticity of the media information on its website, and how much the alliance with the most influential print media in the world helped and which features of both the online and the traditional media WikiLeaks has adopted. In this case study, it has been examined if in WikiLeaks exists a structure of the audit of the received information, in which way the content on their website is structured and how much it is receptive to the average user. In the attempt to define the ethics in the new, electronic environment, the work deals with the difference between anonymous and unknown sources in journalism, naming persons involved, ie minimizing collateral damage during the mass document release, and with the ethical problem of bestowal of information treated as commodity.