Einar Thorsen

WikiLeaks and Whistle-blowing: The Framing of Bradley Manning

Inquiries into freedom of expression and the rights of the press frequently highlight examples where ordinary individuals have taken it upon themselves to leak information to a journalist with the aim of exposing corruption, maleficence, or injustice. Hollywood films have contributed to a certain mythology surrounding whistle-blowing. All the President’s Men’s (1976) depiction of the covert informant “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal is an especially well-known example; others include The China Syndrome (1979), Norma Rae (1979), Silkwood (1983), The Insider (1999), The Constant Gardener (2005), The Informant (2009), and The Whistleblower (2010). In real life, whistle-blowers usually wish to remain anonymous, relying on the journalists to uphold the principle of “protecting their sources” to safeguard them from reprisals. The journalist-whistle-blower relationship can be challenging to negotiate at the best of times, and the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks has transformed it in profound ways.

‘I Wouldn’t Be a Victim When It Comes to Being Heard’: Citizen Journalism and Civic Inclusion

For disabled people, the UK political landscape has in recent years provided a particularly harsh backdrop of austerity and ongoing cuts to welfare and disability benefits. In November 2014, for example, a 39-year-old woman who was unable to work due to chronic pain following two road traffic accidents took her own life. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) had sent several letters threatening to cut off her disability benefits and also demanding that she pay back £4,000 she had already received. During the inquest into her death in March 2015, the county coroner, Anne Pember, noted that she believed the ‘upset caused by the potential withdrawal of her benefits had been the trigger for her to end her life’ (cited in Jones, 2015). According to freedom of information requests by the Disability News Network, the DWP had investigated some 49 cases where benefit claimants had died from February 2012 to February 2015 — 40 of these followed suicide or apparent suicide by the claimant, and 33 contained recommendations for improvements (Pring, 2015).

Seven Characteristics Defining Online News Formats: Towards a typology of online news and live blogs

Whilst live blogs have become an established part of the news media ecology, corresponding research is still in its infancy, especially that which examines the crucial question of sourcing practices. Focussing on three UK news organisations – BBC News, the Guardian and the Telegraph – in this article we provide the largest and most comprehensive empirical study to date comparing sourcing practices in online news and live blogs. We analyse sourcing practices across three different genres of live blogging and corresponding online news articles, through a comparative analysis of events broadly categorised as crisis, politics and sport. Our findings suggest that there are some aspects of sourcing practices that are distinct to live blogs, such as directly embedding social media. However, when it comes to polyvocality (the diversity of who gets to speak), genre-specific journalism norms seem to account for more than the affordances of the platform itself and only in sport live blogs are demotic voices habitually included. Based on these findings, we develop a typology of live blogging and online news articles that documents the nuances in sourcing patterns across different news formats and genres, and provide a theoretical basis for future research in this field.

Cryptic Journalism: News reporting of encryption

In light of Edward Snowden’s global surveillance disclosures, this article examines news discourses about online communication security and surveillance circumvention practices. It analyses 1249 news reports mentioning encryption in The Guardian and The New York Times, covering a three-year period from June 2012 to June 2015 (one year before and two years after the Snowden revelations). Whilst there was a marked increase in the volume of news articles mentioning encryption post-Snowden, the context in which encryption is discussed has since shifted from an initial emphasis on “surveillance” towards “security” issues. However, the research found that greater news coverage of encryption did not necessarily mean an increase in depth of coverage, with most mentions of encryption vague and non-descript. In terms of source usage, the research finds an emphasis on private corporations in both publications analysed. This is problematic when many of the organisations allowed to speak on encryption were those accused of colluding with the US and UK Governments to aid covert mass surveillance—the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and so forth—thus providing them with a platform to exonerate themselves from the accusations. This contradictory depiction of communication security serves the status quo and prevents advancement of the “encrypted by default” communication practice called for by Snowden. This, by extension, has serious implications for both journalistic freedom and civil liberties since it helps to perpetuate the ability of nation states and corporations to conduct indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Afterword: Clinton, Trump, and Artificial Intelligence

Managing Democracy in the Digital Age: Internet regulation, Social Media Use, and Online Civic Engagement represents an important contribution to our understanding of how digital communication intersects with politics in democratic nation states. The chapters in this book perfectly illustrate how far this amalgamation has come since 1960, when J. C. R. Licklider outlined the idea of ‘cooperative interaction between men [sic] and electronic computers’ in his seminal paper entitled ‘Man–Computer Symbiosis’. Later articulated as a vision of an ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’, his ideas informed the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), precursor to today’s Internet. But far from restricting his thinking to scientific research or military communications, Licklider envisaged interconnected computers as having a central role in all parts of society. In his book treatise Libraries of the Future, Licklider professed that ‘telecomputation can be charged in large part to the handling of everyday business, industrial, government, and professional information, and perhaps also to news, entertainment, and education’ (1965, pp. 33–34).

Citizen Journalism at The Margins

Amidst burgeoning literature on citizen journalism, we still know relatively little about how and why genuinely marginalised groups seek to use this form of reporting to challenge their exclusion. In this article, we aim to address this gap by analysing two UK citizen journalism initiatives emanating from The Big Issue Foundation, a national homeless organisation, and Access Dorset, a regional charity for disabled and elderly people. These case studies are united by the authors’ involvement in both instances, primarily through designing and delivering bespoke citizen journalism education and mentoring. Based on over 40 hours of interviews with participants of the workshops and 36 hours of participant observation, we analyse the challenges participants faced in their journey to become citizen journalists. This included: low self-esteem, physical health and mental wellbeing, the need for accessible and adaptable technology, and overcoming fear associated with assuming a public voice. We also analyse marginalised groups’ attitudes to professional journalism and education, and its role in shaping journalistic identity and self-empowerment. Whilst demonstrably empowering and esteem building, our participants were acutely aware of societal power relations that were seemingly still beyond their ability to influence. Those who are marginalised are, nevertheless, in the best position to use citizen journalism as a conduit for social change, we argue—though challenges remain even at the grassroots level to foster and sustain participatory practices.

Introduction: Marginalised Voices, Representations and Practices

Roland Barthes’ analysis of the front cover of the Paris Match, with its image of a young black cadet saluting the French flag, signalled a turning point for media scholarship and demonstrated how media representations of all kinds are ideological (Barthes, 1957). It has been the political project of the British school of Cultural Studies, founded by Stuart Hall et al. in the 1960s, to consider those persons, identities and representations which have been excluded from or derided by mainstream media narratives; to bring to bear analyses of gender, ‘race’ and class and, in doing so, move ‘the margins into the centre, the outside into the inside’ (Hall, 1999: 10).

3) Righting Wrongs: Citizen Journalism and Miscarriages of Justice

This chapter demonstrates the agenda-setting power of citizen journalism in a context of miscarriages of justice. Our empirical analysis focuses on the interaction of media, political and judicial forces following the death of newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, shortly after being struck by a police officer at the G20 Protests in London 2009. We examine the rise of citizen journalism as a key challenge to those institutions that traditionally have been able to control the information environment. We then illustrate how the intervention of citizen journalism, above all else, established the news agenda around the Tomlinson case, disrupted the traditional flows of communication power, and was transformative in the Tomlinson family’s search for justice.