First of all, if you would like to view the full WikiLeaks story, the hour long documentary “WikiRebels” is available in its entirety here. The documentary is very well done and provides a lot of the footage leaked by WikiLeaks, as well as interviews with many of the people involved. Also on the page is a forty-minute YouTube clip – originally leaked by WikiLeaks – of unedited military footage showing civilians being murdered in Baghdad.

WikiLeaks is an international, not-for-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and business whistleblowers. The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organizations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped. One of the most incriminating documents showed that around 15,000 civilian deaths had not been previously admitted by the US government, which brought the total civilian death count to 66,000 civilians. The Guardian provides a whole section of their website dedicated to the archived articles related to WikiLeaks as well as any current activity – you can access it here.

WikiLeaks is a prime example of how citizen journalism can bring otherwise completely unavailable information to the masses. But this also raises a big question: How can journalists deal with the massive explosion of primary source data made available on the Internet? Citizen journalists themselves need to understand and learn how to contextualize their outputs to make them effective, useable and legitimate. Many are also considering that journalists need to reevaluate their ethics for this age. Should this secretive information be released? If so, is it ok for technically unaccredited citizen journalists like WikiLeaks to be the ones releasing it and analyzing it?

Regardless, I believe that this sort of closed-book information should be out in the public and discussed. But we have to be careful with the way we respond and contextualize this information. Multiple sources of input must be considered and citizens should always be critical of raw data or primary sources.

Alec Leibsohn

The news media’s coverage of stories and events is no longer accepted as the full truth. Citizen journalists worldwide now know that even stories claiming to be fact checked still convey false or bias information. Luckily, with the tools of new media, these false claims can be exposed and voiced to the general public. Kate and Jessica’s presentation outlined a particular broadcast done by CBS’ 60 Minutes on September 8^th, 2004 in which four documents critical to George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard were presented as authentic. Within minutes of the broadcast by Dan Rather, blogs all over the internet began discrediting the documents, mostly based on typography experts concluding their forgery.

Within hours of the segment, the authenticity of the documents was questioned by posters on Free Republic, a conservative Internet forum, and discussion quickly spread to various weblogs in the blogosphere, principally Little Green Footballs and Power Line. The Drudge Report picked up the exposure the following day. The initial analysis appeared in posts by “Buckhead,” a username of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta attorney. MacDougald questioned the validity of the documents on the basis of their typography, writing that the memos were “in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman”. An animated GIF of the altered fonts can be viewed here. CBS subsequently could not back up the authenticity of the documents, and Rather was forced to step down as anchor. You can read his official statement on their falsehood here.

The blogosphere’s response to Dan Rather’s report is a significant example of new media’s ability to critically analyze and respond to mainstream news coverage. In this case, blogs were able to channel the skills of experts (typographers) and fact check a false and bias news source. Not only were the blogs able to expose the false documents, but the mass audience for the blogs allowed for the exposure to be conveyed to a wide range of people, eventually reaching the mainstream media. Blogs and new media provide multiple angles on news stories, specifically a critical analysis of their biasness or constructed frameworks. Bloggers are powerful; all news media will be analyzed and criticized by citizen journalists.

-Alec