این فصل را با ذکر تمام تیترهاییش (تاکید میکنم تمام تیترهایش) به انگلیسی و فارسی خلاصه کن   CHAPTER FOUR 

WikiLeaks and “Indirect” Media Reform
CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN , Stockholm University, Sweden



MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
The relatively short history of WikiLeaks (2006–2014) has oﬀered numerous exam- ples of how issues central to media reform (political economy, regulation, owner- ship, law) emerge from their leaks and activities. As I note, WikiLeaks is not a media reform group nor, for the most part, have WikiLeaks activities targeted media organizations or media-related policy. In terms of reform strategy, WikiLeaks—as perhaps the only whistleblowing site known across a broad cross- section of the global population—ﬁnds itself in an unusual, somewhat isolated position. My chapter on WikiLeaks is unlike the others in this book as it frames debates on media reform as emerging as a by-product of the actions of WikiLeaks, rather than addressing speciﬁc strategies for reform. I would argue that, given the nature of its activities, coalition-building around a single organization such as WikiLeaks would be, at best, diﬃcult. However, other whistleblowing sites such as GlobalLeaks.org are starting to emerge, and larger-scale freedom of speech organi- zations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Article 19 are evolving into a clear cluster of “digi- tal defenders” advocating for the rights of whistle-blowers and users alike, and, thus, oﬀer a valuable node for advocating media reform in relation to whistle- blowing, transparency, and journalism.

In a special panel at the 2011 National Conference for Media Reform held in Boston, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Greg Mitchell, together with writer

Micah Sifry, were asked to consider the relationship between media reform and the rise of WikiLeaks. The discussion covered a wide range of issues, but what became clear was that WikiLeaks was considered both an important partici- pant in a new, vibrant media ecology and a symptom of a deep malaise in US journalism. At the core of this malaise was a failure on the part of reporters and media organizations to engage in investigative journalism that questioned the fundamental powers of corporations and the state. WikiLeaks, the participants argued, had beaten hallowed organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post at their own game, resulting in hostility toward the whistle- blowing site on the part of the US press. Beyond competition, a more troubling explanation for the adversarial relationship between WikiLeaks and the press was that mainstream media—themselves large, proﬁt-driven entities—were seen to be as much a part of the so-called establishment as the state and corpo- rate entities they purported to oversee on the part of the general citizenry. As Emily Bell (2010, 5) put it: “this is the ﬁrst real battleground between the political establishment and the open web . . . [which] forces journalists and news organisations to demonstrate to what extent they are now part of an establishment it is their duty to report.”
There can be little doubt that, since 2010, the material leaked by WikiLeaks, the attention surrounding these leaks, the legal actions taken against Chelsea Manning and the threatened legal action against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Pilkington 2011) have all contributed to a broad popular debate on the functioning of contemporary mainstream media systems (see Brevini et al. 2013). In an opinion piece on the relationship between WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and journalism, I posited the following regarding their rise to prominence:
WikiLeaks and Anonymous are an expression, a crystallisation of a dissatis- faction with the extent to which primarily commercial, but also public ser- vice, news organisations have willingly absorbed elite discourses in relation to socio-economic, legal and military issues. Stories which expose political or corporate misconduct should not to be seen as the antithesis to these dis- courses. Often, such instances are simply deﬁned as “the exceptions that prove the rule” while the greater meta-story of capitalism and western power remain unchallenged. (Christensen 2013)
The core of my argument was that groups such as WikiLeaks can be viewed through several lenses. The most logical perspective is to consider the concrete actions of these groups in the form of leaks and online activism, and the con- crete impact(s) of these actions. In addition, however, I felt it was important to consider both what these two groups symbolized, why they emerged, and how they challenge and potentially reshape fundamental relationships: between citizens and the state (impacted by providing access to sensitive intelligence previously hidden from view); between citizens and the media (impacted by exposure of the shortcomings of an uncritical commercial media system); and,
 
between media and governments (impacted by challenging the mantle of “watchdog” proudly trumpeted by major mainstream news outlets). All three of these relationships are fundamental within any discussion of media reform.

WIKILEAKS : FR OM JOURNALISM TO L AW
Within this landscape of shifting relationships, it is my contention that an impact upon the broader media reform debate is an important by-product of the actions taken by groups such as WikiLeaks, as well as the legal, political, and economic consequences of those actions. As I have already stated, WikiLeaks is not a media reform activist organization (although it is not immune to providing harsh critiques of media systems or policy), and so this chapter does not provide an examination of a particular methodology for impacting reform. Rather, I would like to consider the place of WikiLeaks within media reform, and how the actions they have taken part in, and the responses to those actions in the media and politics, have important implica- tions for these debates.
If we consider groups such as WikiLeaks to be players in media reform, then the ﬁrst issue to be clariﬁed is the role they fulﬁll. Michel Foucault made the following observation in a debate in 1974 with Noam Chomsky: “The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can ﬁght against them” (Foucault 1974, 171). Via their leaks and online activism, WikiLeaks and Anonymous have pitched,
as their central raisons d’etre, the “unmasking” of the workings of power and, in particular, power structures—police, military, politics, corporations—to the general public as forces for, if not perhaps good, at least order and stability. What is interesting for the purposes of this chapter is that the eﬀorts of WikiLeaks to expose the raw mechanics of power had, and continues to have, the crucial side-eﬀect of throwing down the gauntlet in front of mainstream media outlets. I have also written that the rise of these WikiLeaks can, at least in part, be linked to what I called the failure of post-9/11 status quo journalism in the United States and Europe, leading to a desire on the part of many citi- zens for deeper analysis and critique of power. Thus, groups like WikiLeaks have ﬁlled a gap: “WikiLeaks and Anonymous are an expression, a crystallisa- tion of a dissatisfaction with the extent to which primarily commercial, but also public service, news organisations have willingly absorbed elite discourses in relation to socio-economic, legal and military issues” (Christensen 2013).
With an organization such as WikiLeaks, it is important to distinguish between its leaks as a tool for instigating transparency and reform (military, political, corporate or otherwise), and media reform as a potential by-product
 
of their acts of leaking or online activism. For the most part, WikiLeaks (with a few minor exceptions) has not placed media organizations or media policy in their activist cross-hairs, yet their activism has exposed a number of issues central to global media reform movements: an uncomfortably close relation- ship between governments/states and the media; the inadequacy of media- related policies in relation to protection of the public interest; an imbalance in mainstream media coverage between those in established positions of political- economic power and, for example, activist groups; and, importantly, the potentially antidemocratic impact of re-regulation, the commercialization of media, and related threats to public service systems.
While WikiLeaks had earned a reputation as a whistle-blowing site back in 2006, it wasn’t until the release of the so-called Iraq and Afghanistan War Documents in 2010—and the high-impact “Collateral Murder” video—that the organization really broke through in the public, political, and journalistic imagination (WikiLeaks 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). While previous leaks on phar- maceutical companies, Swiss banks, and climate change negotiations were certainly important, they had a relatively minimal impact on the media. Rev- elations regarding US military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the release of a massive number of US diplomatic cables (WikiLeaks 2010d), on the other hand, raised questions as to why it was WikiLeaks, and not news organizations such as the New York Times or Washington Post, that had obtained the material. Interestingly, at the trial of Chelsea Manning in 2013, Manning stated that she had initially tried to leak the material to both the New York Times and Washington Post (to no avail) before turning to WikiLeaks. For Ben- kler (2012, 330), organizations such as WikiLeaks force us to consider:
the challenges that a radically decentralized global networked public sphere poses for those systems of control that developed in the second half of the twentieth century to tame the fourth estate, to make the press not only “free,” but also “responsible.” Doing so allows us to understand that the threat represented by Wikileaks was not any single cable, but the fraying of the relatively loyal and safe relationship between the United States Govern- ment and its watchdog. Nothing captures that threat more ironically than the spectacle of Judith Miller, the disgraced New York Times reporter who yoked that newspaper’s credibility to the Bush Administration’s propaganda campaign regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War, using Fox News as a platform to criticize Julian Assange for ne- glecting the journalist’s duty of checking his sources and instead providing raw cables to the public.
McNair (2012, 77) notes that the “loyal and safe relationship” between gov- ernment and media described by Benkler resulted in a ﬂow of information controlled by political elites. This ﬂow, however, was now being subverted by
 
organizations such as WikiLeaks, with the possibility of reshaping the news agenda.
The work of Benkler (2012) on the legal implications of the WikiLeaks case for freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the United States is comple- mented by a signiﬁcant volume of other legal scholarship on the issue, indicat- ing the myriad media reform issues at the heart of the WikiLeaks case (e.g., Cannon 2013; Davidson 2011; Fenster 2012; Peters 2011; Rothe and Steinmetz 2013; Wells 2012). For Benkler, “the networked Fourth Estate” is one that will likely work not as a replacement for a strained preexisting media system, but rather one that will work in conjunction with that system. This interaction, Benkler (2012, 396) writes, will be “both constructive and destructive,” but one that is necessary given that, “the traditional, managerial-professional sources of responsibility in a free press function imperfectly under present market conditions.”
Beyond journalistic failure, scholars such as Tambini (2013) and Lynch (2010, 2013) have investigated the implications of the WikiLeaks releases for future regulation and censorship of related whistle-blowing sites in the United Kingdom and the United States. For Tambini (2013, 284), the huge volume of material released by WikiLeaks in the US diplomatic cable leak, “marked a watershed moment in the development of the legal and ethical frameworks for news publishing.” The author notes that in order to ensure that future whistle- blowing organizations are aﬀorded protection under the law, their ability to “self-regulate” and to “develop, codify, and implement ethical principles to govern their publication decisions” will be paramount. A failure to do so will result in the impression of an irresponsible information free-for-all, thus pro- viding states with clear suﬃcient cause to pass restrictive laws geared toward censoring or even closing down their operations: “if rather than seeking pro- tection through the law of free expression WikiLeaks continues to evade the law, this could result in a censorship backlash. If mainstream media con-
tinue to conspire in the viliﬁcation of WikiLeaks, releases may provide a jus- tiﬁcation that undermines the contribution of the Internet to free speech” (285–286).
If, however, these groups succeed in establishing a transparent, ethical pub- lication code, “there is a small chance they may be permitted to operate in a new extra-jurisdictional space of public interest journalism” (285). Lynch (2013, 321) makes a similar observation about WikiLeaks: namely that their impact on media law in the United States prior to what she calls the “megaleak” period was “salutary”. After Cablegate, however, concern began to grow regarding the implications of a WikiLeaks prosecution in the United States on the main- stream press, and “the political backlash against WikiLeaks immediately proved disadvantageous to citizen journalists, as pending shield legislation in the United States that might have indemniﬁed them from legal reprisal was sharply narrowed after the release of the Afghan War Logs” (321).
 
P HASES OF WIKILEAKS 

In the second half of the chapter I would like to consider the various concrete ways in which the actions of WikiLeaks have impacted issues of media reform. Although not a traditional media reform organization, the categorization of media strategies utilized by activists in relation to mainstream political cul- tures posited by Rucht (2004, 430) is a useful framework for considering the work of WikiLeaks. Based on a historical analysis of the media strategies of activist movements over several decades, Rucht proposed what he called the “Quadruple A” model: (1) Attack, (2) Adaptation, (3) Alternatives, and (4) Abstention. I would like to adjust the order of Rucht’s strategies somewhat so that they better ﬁt with the WikiLeaks chronology.

ALTERNATIvES TO THE mAINSTREAm 
It is fair to say that the early years of WikiLeaks—from the ﬁrst leak in Decem- ber 2006 (a list of potential political assassinations in Somalia) up to the pub- lication of the Iraq and Afghan war documents in early 2010—were marked by a degree of media fascination with the organization itself, but a relative paucity of articles on the content of the leaks. This is not to say that the stories leaked by the organization were insigniﬁcant. From 2008 to 2010, for example, WikiLeaks released documents showing potential money-laundering in the Cayman Islands by the major Swiss bank Julius Baer (WikiLeaks 2008a); the inﬂuence of large corporate pharmaceutical companies on the policy-making of the World Health Organization—including forcing developing nations to maintain high prices for drugs at the expense of poorer patients dying (WikiLeaks 2008b); the illegal dumping of toxic waste by corporations oﬀ of the Ivory Coast (WikiLeaks 2009b); the membership lists of the far-right Brit- ish National Party (WikiLeaks 2009a); and, the use of intimidation tactics by the US government during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen (Carrington 2010).
During these early years, WikiLeaks was somewhat of an anomaly. Journal- ists and politicians did not know what to make of the organization and, as already mentioned, media coverage was sparse. A strong argument could be made, however, that a number of the early leaks from this period—in particu- lar those on WHO price-ﬁxing and the UN Climate Change Conference— were stories with implications for the health and safety of billions around the globe. In response to the WHO documents, James Love (2011), the director of Knowledge Economy International, wrote the following:

After reading these cables, it is diﬃcult to stomach the defenses of US se- crecy. Forcing developing countries to raise the price of drugs has predictable and well known consequences—it kills people, and increases suﬀering.
 
Many people could care less—including reporters and editors of newspa- pers. How much of this ends up in the Washington Post, the New York Times or the Guardian these days? But others who do care now have more access to information, and more credibility in their criticisms of government policy, because of the disclosures of the cables.
From a media reform perspective, and working from Love’s arguments in relation to the WHO revelations, two issues emerge. First, that the stories, once leaked by WikiLeaks, did not receive signiﬁcant media attention speaks to the issues raised by Benkler (and a myriad of critical political economists over the years) regarding the failure of the establishment corporate media. The second issue, however, runs deeper than just a lack of coverage of the leaks once they emerged, but has to do with the fact that the stories leaked by WikiLeaks about abuse of corporate and political power (particularly in relation to the subjuga- tion of developing nations) are not addressed regardless of WikiLeaks. In other words, these early leaks illustrated a double failure on the part of mainstream journalism: that, historically, they have not covered the issues raised by WikiLeaks despite the massive international implications; and, second, their relative silence on the issues even after the material was released. It is perhaps only with the passage of time that perspective can be gained on both the relative importance of the leaks provided by WikiLeaks between 2006 and 2010—when, I would argue, WikiLeaks was acting as an alternative to the mainstream media—and the failure of mainstream media to engage with that material.

ADApTATION TO THE mAINSTREAm 

WikiLeaks witnessed a signiﬁcant shift in both notoriety and operating proce- dures at the start of 2010. From early 2010 through 2011 the organization leaked a massive volume of material including the Iraq War documents, the Afghan War documents, the “Collateral Murder” video and the diplomatic cables. The impact of these leaks was greatly enhanced by the fact that WikiLeaks made the decision to collaborate with a number of mainstream media outlets for the collation, analysis, presentation, and release of the material (primarily the war documents). The strategy of releasing leaked documents to selected media outlets—the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, and El Pais—one month prior to a predetermined (and uniform) release date—was an indication that WikiLeaks was interested in maximizing the impact of these leaks. Some six months before these large releases, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outlined his thinking regarding the value of information: “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to inﬁnity, so the perceived value goes to zero” (cited in Christensen 2011a, 2).
 
The leaked material proved to be a boon for both WikiLeaks and their main- stream media partners. As I have argued, given the political leanings of WikiLeaks, the collaboration may have appeared to be surprising, but it was one Assange was willing to make in exchange for exposure, particularly when taking into account the likely unwillingness of mainstream media outlets to engage with the material were it just to be dumped onto the WikiLeaks website for all to see:
While WikiLeaks material is tailor-made for the critical eye of the alternative press, the political economy of most capitalist media systems means that these alternative outlets, and their contents, are de facto marginalized. While a deal with mainstream newspapers could be seen as a Faustian bargain for WikiLeaks, it was a deal that Assange was willing to make, probably because it would enable access to a sizeable chunk of citizens not part of the core of WikiLeaks’ lovers (who follow the organization no matter what) or haters (who detest WikiLeaks no matter what). (Christensen 2011b)
The collaboration between these well-established international media outlets and WikiLeaks, the production of the inﬂuential “Collateral Murder” video (Christensen 2014), and the increased editorial role played by WikiLeaks and Assange in terms of material accumulation and release, also raised a fundamen- tal issue: the extent to which Assange could be seen as a journalist, and WikiLeaks a journalistic organization. Given the content of the WikiLeaks releases, the journalistic designation was central, as (at least in the US context) it could theoretically aﬀord Assange a degree of protection under US law. The 2013 trial of Chelsea Manning brought this issue to the fore, with the charge of “aiding the enemy” levelled against the soldier who had leaked the material to WikiLeaks. The implications for journalism in the United States of a guilty verdict on this particular charge were enormous—potentially criminalizing any media outlet that published leaked material deemed to damage the national interest—yet the US media aﬀorded the trial little attention. In the end, Man- ning was found not guilty’ on the “aiding the enemy” charge, but still received a thirty-ﬁve-year prison sentence.
In addition to the legal implications of designating Assange a journalist, the WikiLeaks–mainstream media collaboration on the release of what Lynch (2013) calls “megaleaks” created a degree of tension among professional jour- nalists who saw Assange and WikiLeaks as providers of raw data, rather than journalists. In his analysis of how mainstream newspapers framed WikiLeaks in relation to professional journalistic boundaries, Coddington (2012, 378) found that “institutionality emerged as a key professional journalistic value . . . while source-based reporting routines and objectivity were largely bound within those contexts.” In other words, WikiLeaks was seen as lacking the institu- tional, organizational and professional values and structures required of a true journalistic organization.
 
The reform issues raised during the WikiLeaks period of adaptation are myriad, but the question of “who is a journalist?” is undoubtedly fundamental (e.g., Handley and Rutigliano 2012). The attempt by large mainstream media organizations to downplay the role of WikiLeaks and Assange, and to construct professional and organizational walls between their organizations and WikiLeaks speaks not only to the commercial value of professional “boundary maintenance” discussed by Gieryn (1983), but also to the cultural capital associ- ated with news work. Thus, while the material provided by WikiLeaks was important enough for major international news outlets to exploit over a matter of years, the whistle-blowing organization was not important enough to desig- nate as a journalistic organization—even if the implications for such a barrier is the imprisonment of both Assange and Manning.
There is one ﬁnal media reform issue in relation to the WikiLeaks–main- stream media collaboration that is important to note: the political-economic beneﬁts aﬀorded these commercial outlets as a result of the cooperation:
It is clear that WikiLeaks have performed a crucial democratic function via their revelations, and it is also clear that this function was made possible— with the release of the Afghanistan and Iraq war documents—via a calcu- lated collaboration with mainstream media. [T]hrough this collaboration
WikiLeaks sent a clear message to the broader public: whether we like it or not, large news outlets are still important in contemporary society. It is equally important to note that this collaboration was done with the clear side-eﬀects of boosting the sales ﬁgures, advertising revenues and socio- cultural capital of these already powerful, Western media organizations. (Christensen 2011a, 2–3)
This is not to say that the message to the general public about the impor- tance of mainstream outlets on the part of WikiLeaks was overt, but rather that it was a side-eﬀect of their collaboration. WikiLeaks clearly challenged main- stream media power, yet, when we look at the issue of media reform using the lens of the networked Fourth Estate, we must also consider and analyze the extent to which such collaboration could end up boosting the inﬂuence and capital of already powerful corporate media actors. 

ABSTENTION FRO m AND ATTACK OF THE mAINSTREAm 
I have merged two of Rucht’s categories (abstention and attack) because I feel that the combination best explains the most recent phase of the WikiLeaks relationship with the international mainstream media in the post-Afghanistan/ Iraq war dossier leak era. As noted in the previous section, the relationship between WikiLeaks and the newspapers with which they had collaborated became strained to the point of breaking (most famously with the New York Times and Guardian). Several pieces were written after 2011 in which harsh
 
opinions about Julian Assange, and the extent to which the material leaked to WikiLeaks had, in fact, led to any positive change, were proﬀered:
Former New York Times editor Bill Keller oﬀered a particularly acid post- mortem when he wrote that “not all that much” had changed after the WikiLeaks releases, and that the leaks, “did not herald, as the documentari- ans yearn to believe, some new digital age of transparency. In fact, if there is a larger point, it is quite the contrary.” In other words, according to Keller, WikiLeaks is actually responsible for the more aggressive stance taken by the US government in relation to security and surveillance. (Christensen 2012)
In addition, Bill Keller also (famously) described Assange as a news source and not a professional collaborator. In an interview for Rolling Stone magazine (Hastings 2012), Assange gave his interpretation of Keller’s dismissal of himself and WikiLeaks:
Keller was trying to save his own skin from the espionage investigation in two ways. First, on a legal technicality, by claiming that there was no col- laboration, only a passive relationship between journalist and source. And second, by distancing themselves from us by attacking me personally, using all the standard tabloid character-assassination attacks. Keller said, “Ju-
lian Assange may or may not be a journalist, but he’s not my kind of journal- ist.” My immediate reaction is, “Thank God I’m not Bill Keller’s type of journalist.”
The formal working relationship between WikiLeaks and major media out- lets came to an end and from 2012 on, WikiLeaks returned to the position they occupied some three to ﬁve years earlier. In this case, however, I would deﬁne this latter era as one of abstention rather than alternative, as the organization had by now achieved a signiﬁcant level of fame and inﬂuence. Interestingly, both of these newspapers, as well as many media outlets around the globe, continued to make use of material made available via WikiLeaks. During this period, WikiLeaks used social media (primarily Twitter, where the organization has over one million followers) to engage in debates with, and attacks upon, mainstream outlets the organization felt was misrepresenting their goals, actions or motives.
The media reform implications of the last few years of WikiLeaks, as well as the strained relationship between the mainstream media and the organization, cannot be assessed without also considering two factors: the crushing economic embargo placed upon WikiLeaks by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal following pressure from the US government; and the threat of the indictment of WikiLeaks founder Assange by the US government. While the antagonistic relationship between WikiLeaks and their former collaborators has dampened the possibilities for productive cross-over journalism, the aggressive position taken by the US government in relation to WikiLeaks—made concrete by the
 
thirty-ﬁve-year sentence handed down to Chelsea Manning—has sent a clear chilling message to whistle-blowers and whistle-blowing organizations. In addition, the position sends a message to media organizations considering col- laboration with such individuals and organizations, as highlighted by the 2013 raid on the Guardian oﬃces by British authorities to locate computer hard- drives containing material obtained from Edward Snowden (Borger 2013). In short, the period of abstention and attack by WikiLeaks is marked by an increase in aggression from states over perceived threats to national security; a process that includes tactics such as ﬁnancial strangulation and the threat of arrest. The result has been a marked decline in WikiLeaks activity over this period.

CONCL USION 
In this chapter I have attempted to outline how the relatively short history of WikiLeaks (2006–2014) has oﬀered numerous examples of how issues central to media reform (political economy, regulation, ownership, law) emerge from their leaks and activities. As I noted at the start of this chapter, WikiLeaks is not a media reform group, nor, for the most part, have WikiLeaks leaks or activities targeted media organizations or media-related policy. In this conclu- sion, I would like to summarize what I consider to be the key media reform issues that have emerged via WikiLeaks, and to do so by considering the three stages on WikiLeaks relations discussed in the previous section.
First, the early WikiLeaks period as an “alternative” to mainstream output highlights not only the lack of original coverage of corporate and state malfea- sance, but also an unwillingness of major media corporations to engage with important material even when it is released into the public domain. The important material obtained and released by WikiLeaks on, for example, cli- mate change and global health points to the need for formalized support or protection for outlets such as WikiLeaks which expose criminal or unethical activities on the part of states and corporations—activities that are clearly in the public interest.
Second, the period of WikiLeaks–mainstream media collaboration around 2010, and the subsequent falling out, raised a number of key reform issues. The issues of what constitutes journalism, and who is a journalist, are obvi- ously paramount as they connect to issues of law and legal protection and are thus in need of clariﬁcation. These issues also relate to the political economy of the media: Benkler was likely correct in pointing out that the networked Fourth Estate will be an amalgam of new media actors (such as WikiLeaks) and established media organizations. Yet Bill Keller’s assertion that WikiLeaks was a source and not a collaborator has both legal and economic implica- tions, as newspapers reap both proﬁt and prestige from the free material provided to them by WikiLeaks. As the networked Fourth Estate evolves, a
 
central question will be the extent to which (or if ) such partnerships needs to be both funded and regulated so as to protect those taking the greatest risk from economic exploitation.
Finally, recent events connected to WikiLeaks—the Manning conviction, the economic embargo, and potential criminal charges against Assange—raise the specter of the use of the law by the state as a blunt instrument to intimidate those who challenge government or corporate power. At the time of writing, Edward Snowden sits in Russia, unable to return to the United States without being taken into custody and charged. Media reform is also about the protec- tion of those who in good faith expose crimes or unethical behavior, as their information can constitute key components of media reports and news con- tent. When news organizations that obtain information deemed to have been taken illegally—or in violation of the “national interest”—are also treated in a criminal fashion, it is the start of a slippery slope. What the WikiLeaks case has shown us is that it is possible to expose illegal state or corporate activity, and to distribute that information to a broad public. What remains to be seen, how- ever, is the extent to which mainstream media organizations, corporations, and the state consider such an organization to be a threat to their professional, ﬁnancial, or political interests, and, thus, not worthy of protection. The protec- tion of whistle-blowers thus needs to be a central focus for media reform move- ments in the coming years.