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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
the British and Swedish newspapers were more fact-oriented and did more research
into the original documents. The countries and topics reported about differed in detail,
however, on a structural level, there were a lot of commonalities between the media in
the different countries: They reported mainly about the home country and about topics
relating to the home country.
Traditional news values such as conflict, personification, proximity and a focus on
events dominated news selection similarly in all countries. The development of the
news narrative was also very similar in all countries (except for the British newspaper
the Guardian): As the reporting was very event-oriented, the media reported about the
publication of the documents in the beginning of December, but then went on to report
about the sexual offence accusations against Julian Assange and the “cyberwar”
between hackers and credit card companies in the second week of December. Despite
the continued publication of new material, except for the Guardian, the other media
almost completely stopped reporting about the documents in the second half of
December.
Generally, the analysis showed a lack of research on the part of the journalists and no
sign of an emerging “data journalism” in conventional journalism, with some
exceptions. If there were institutions interested in keeping the documents confidential
and burying critical issues in masses of data where they would not be found, the
mechanisms according to which the media function (personification, event-orientation)
would have helped them to divert the public attention.
Differences between media types seem to be more prevalent than differences between
countries. On television, more interviews with experts and commentators were shown,
while there was very little about the content of the documents (except for some flashy
revelations about politicians) and almost no commentary, while the newspapers
generally provided more analysis of the documents and more editorial commentary.
With regard to the frame and bias of the reporting, the affiliation of the newspaper
seems to be more important than the country. Conservative, non-cooperating media
were more critical of Wikileaks and reported less about the documents than more leftwing,
cooperating media.
Despite the masses of documents published, the reporting in all countries put a
significant emphasis on the person of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Unanimously,
the journalists emphasized conflict and dramatized the events. Although many
journalists claimed in their comments with regard to the responsibility required when
publishing such documents that professional journalism was needed to select and factcheck
the information, in reality, many articles were based on second-hand reports and
press releases, revealing that mostly information that is easily obtained and does not
involve resources is published in the conventional media.
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