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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
As expected, most television news (except for the Swedish) dealt relatively in more of
their news items with the more dramatic actions against Wikileaks than newspapers did
(France 2: 80%, Tagesschau: 68.8%, BBC: 46.3%; La 1(TVE) 31.8%, SVT1: 23.9%;
average of all media: 29.3%).
In general, a lot of the news items just stated opinions about the publications or dealt
with the criminal charges against Assange and the so-called “cyberwar” between
credit-card- , internet provider companies and self-proclaimed Wikileaks-supporters.
During the course of December 2010, media attention for Wikileaks-related issues
rapidly dropped in all five countries. More than half of all the items related to Wikileaks
were published in the first week of December, ending with Assange’s arrest on
December 7. There was a small peak in Mid-December when Wikileaks-founder Julian
Assange was released on bail; right after that, in most media the reporting almost
ceased. This occurred despite the fact that in The Guardian and on the Wikileakswebsite,
new issues from the Embassy documents continued to be revealed every day
all through December of 2010, several of them of more relevance than the ones
published in the beginning of December. But in most mainstream media, only brief
attention was awarded: to the event of the publication of the documents itself, to the
actions against Wikileaks and some hackers’ reaction to that, and to the accusations
against and the arrest of Julian Assange. With the exception of the Guardian, most
media did not dig deeper into the material or bother to analyze the documents more
intensely, not even those media officially cooperating with Wikileaks.
Instead, the media contributed to a dramatization of the events with the language that
was used as well. Julian Assange was mystified as a “rock star”, “terminator-angel”
(Der Spiegel, Dec 15), “hacker genius”, “free speech martyr” (Times, Dec 21), “new
viking”, “freedom fighter” (FAZ, Dec 17) or demonized as “common enemy” (Guardian,
Dec 9) and “cyber terrorist” (Times, Dec 21). When a group of hackers tried to attack
credit card and internet provider companies as a revenge for impeding Wikileaks (an
attempt that proved to have rather minor effects after all), the action was dramatized as
“cyberwar”. Irrespective of the overall position a newsroom was taking towards
Wikileaks, dramatization occurred in all the media. The media that officially or
otherwise cooperated with Wikileaks dramatized the events by exaggerating their
relevance (in order to advertise their achievements, a finding that is in line with the
observation that exclusivity enhances news values, see Allern 2002). The media which
did not cooperate published only a few of the documents themselves and took a more
critical stance towards Wikileaks dramatized the issue with a negative slant. This was
found in all the examined countries. The differences were greater between the
cooperating and the non- cooperating newspapers than between countries.
Conclusion
Some cultural differences between journalisms in the five countries could be observed.
In line with other studies about journalism and political cultures, there were more
editorial commentaries in the French and German newspapers than in the others while
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