WikiLeaks has done it again: created a flutter with its 92,000 pages expose on the US-led war in Afghanistan and its impact on the South Asian region. In the process it has also opened a can of worms, proving conclusively the involvement of Pakistan’s spy agency in terror activities in that country and in India.

This is not the first time WikiLeaks has exposed what made an expose. Way back in December 2006, WikiLeaks documented the decision by Somali Islamic militants to execute government officials. Since then, WikiLeaks has on many occasions produced startling disclosures, but none quite as big and as impactful as the release of 92,000 pages of intelligence documents relating to the Afghan war.

WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Paul Assange, describes itself as ‘an uncensored system for untraceable mass document leaking’. All sources are anonymous, and WikiLeaks has done so well at protecting the sources of its documents that Assange recently claimed WikiLeaks has never lost a source.

All of this has made WikiLeaks the preferred vehicle for whistleblowers across the world.

Raffi Khatchadourian of ‘The New Yorker’ in his piece ‘No Secrets’ profiles Julian Paul Assange:

“In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.”

So what is WikiLeaks doing?

WikiLeaks states that its mission is to expose oppressive regimes and reveal unethical behavior in governments and corporations.

That is traditionally the defined role of the Fourth Estate – a role the media, increasingly under the control of major corporations, has abdicated to varying degrees. In that sense, WikiLeaks succeeds where the traditional media has failed.

Take the example of the ‘Collateral Murder video‘ codenamed ‘Project B’, wherein a powerhouse like Reuters failed to procure the relevant video from the army even after citing the Freedom of Information Act. When all legitimate avenues failed, WikiLeaks made the video public in April 2010.

There is a message here, nice and clear: the hegemony of the traditional media houses is now well and truly over.

Media conglomerates have historically reserved to themselves the right to disseminate information. Which is fine in theory – the problem however is that such media houses hid as much as they revealed, their decisions on what to hide and what to reveal being dictated largely by commercial considerations.

The reader was aware of these manipulations, but as long as the hegemony existed, he had no choice. Now he does.

The internet, generally, and the rise of sites like WikiLeaks in particular – aided, abetted and amplified by the social media megaphones like Facebook and Twitter — have broken the media stranglehold on information; confirmed the public’s sense that all was not being told to them; and finally put ‘news’ back in the news.

The traditional media has been reduced to crying hoarse, claiming that the Afghan war expose is not new ‘news’ – but their sour grapes cries are being ignored by a public that is paying unimaginable attention to WikiLeaks, in the process elevating it to the pedestal of crusader in the public interest.

So is this then the beginning of the end of traditional media?

Not necessarily. We still require news organizations, editors and reporters skilled at gathering news, packaging and presenting it for us to read and to watch. Anne Applebaum of ‘The Washington Post’ in her piece ‘WikiLeaks’ defense of journalism‘ says the notion that the Internet can replace traditional newsgathering has been revealed as a myth.

“If you don’t know by now that the ISI helped create the Taliban, or that civilian casualties are generally a problem for NATO, or that special forces units are hunting for al-Qaeda fighters, all that means is that you don’t read the mainstream media. Which means that you don’t really want to know.”

Applebaum’s point is well taken. The WikiLeaks exposure would have made little or no sense without the traditional reporting that had gone before; that reporting, by top flight media houses, chronicled the war ever since it was launched in the immediate wake of 9/11, and today that body of work provides context for the documentation outed by WikiLeaks.

A tendency on the part of ‘analysts’ is to consider this a zero sum game: WikiLeaks and other ‘non-traditional sources’, they argue, rings the knell for ‘traditional’ journalism.

The argument confuses the message with the messenger. The role of ‘journalism’ is not defined as ‘the transmission of information on traditional platforms’; journalism is merely the collection, collation and dissemination of information. Period. Whether that process happens through print, on television or the internet, it is still journalism; whether it happens via the New York Times or WikiLeaks, the core remains journalism.

So here is what I would argue: A WikiLeaks does not spell the death of traditional journalism, just as social media does not spell the end of traditional media. Rather, what we are witness to is a rapid evolving of the structure and shape of the media itself.

Where, earlier, it was monopolistic in nature, and featured the one-to-many paradigm, today that scenario is changing, and a vibrant many-to-many paradigm is gradually evolving. And thanks to this organic evolution, the customer – to wit, the consumer of news and information – is truly king again.

Also read:

Wikileaks busts myth about the irrelevance of mainstream media

The Purpose and People of WikiLeaks

No Secrets

Did Wikileaks Cross the Line?

The WikiLeaks Paradox