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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Washington bureau) to attend the first meeting with the source. His initial assignment
was to ‘to get a sense of the material’ (Keller, 2011). Eric Schmitt was in charge of
calibrating the material and dealing with Julian Assange. Eric Schmitt, David Leigh
(The Guardian), Nick Daves (The Guardian) and John Goetz (Der Spiegel) worked
together to organise and sort the material.
On November the 1 st they obtained the diplomatic cables after certain disputes with
Julian Assange, and he threatened to contact his lawyers. The New York Times wasn’t
the leader of the negotiations with the source. The Guardian editors were the ones who
were contacted by Assange to lead the group of media. So they spontaneously
coordinated the work during those initial days. In October, when WikiLeaks gave The
Guardian its third cache about the diplomatic relations between the U.S. and other
countries, Assange imposed a new condition: not to share the material with The New
York Times. He was actually open to the idea of talking with other American news
organisations.
As Bill Keller said, The New York Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay
anything. The only major condition was certain “embargoes” for publishing the material.
They assumed Assange was familiar with the benefits of such embargoes, which are
commonplace in journalism, in generating suspense and amplifying a story (Keller,
2011). The main condition was temporary: they could not write anything until WikiLeaks
posted the documents on its website. In November, once The New York Times had the
diplomatic cables, Assange threatened them, asking “Tell me, are you in contact with
your legal counsel? You had better be.”
The first contact between Julian Assange and Javier Moreno, the executive editor of El
País, took place in November via phone. “Assange phoned me, with a gasped voice. It
was a brief call, surprisingly for me. He talked slowly and he thought twice all he was
saying with a deep and serious voice” (Moreno, 2010a). In that first conversation,
Assange told to Moreno he was willing to share 250,000 U.S. Embassy cables with El
País (the last count was at 251,288). According to Moreno, El País was invited to this
international coalition of news organisations because it was considered to be a
reference in Spanish speaking countries and a leading newspaper in Spain (2010b).
Two days later, they resumed their phone conversation about the range of documents
and the implications of the leak. “It was at that point when I started realising the
enormous consequences for the U.S. administration, its reputation, allies, adversaries,
for the future of journalism and even more for the debate about freedom in western
democracies” (Moreno, 2010a). After those conversations, several meetings took place
in Switzerland between El Pais´ Vicente Jimenez, assistant executive editor, Jan
Martínez Ahrens, vice executive editor, and Julian Assange. The first face to face
contact between Javier Moreno and Assange took place in the middle of December
2010 in London. It was a set of short meetings aimed at making the leak as accurate as
possible. They agreed on the publication schedule and on omitting names and possible
information that could endanger national security or put lives at risk in countries with
the death penalty. Javier Moreno participated in several online chats with audiences.
He said that “they were not formally asked by Assange to pay for the documents, and
that if that were the case, the newspaper would never have accepted” (2010a).
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