Topic > Wikileaks, the new fourth estate - 746

Wikileaks, a non-profit organization that implies a lot about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, began its activities in 2006, leaking sensitive information to other sources and sharing them online for public viewing and responses using the Internet as a base of operations and has taken journalism to a new level. “Just as Daniel Ellsberg, and then Woodward and Bernstein, turned journalism into a transaction of journalists and sources, now it will be a hacker function” (Wolff, 2010). This phenomenon is shifting the face of journalism towards online journalism which has made it the new fourth estate, and Julian Assange laid the foundation stone in the form of Wikileaks. He always speaks "to bring important news and information to the public... the original material along with our reporting so that both readers and historians can see the evidence of the truth." (Assange, 2006) Taking Free Speech John Adams talked about free speech as if there had never been such a thing and it doesn't exist now, but he hopes for a better future where everyone can experience free speech. The media has now changed as most of them have become commercial and no longer has an antagonistic relationship with secrecy, concentration of power and corruption as the corporations that pay politicians now own the journalists and media agencies. Coming to Wikileaks, most mainstream journalists hate it because it not only provided discreet information about governments but also exposed the media and how they act as a smokescreen generating machine for the government. (Ben, 2010), comparing current journalism with that of thirty-year-old journalism Ben Tripp, exclaims that if there had been such a leak about governments and corporations, a properly motivated Fourth Estate would be... half the paper ...to face the consequences of what is to come for a better tomorrow, but how many of us will be ready for such a sacrifice. In conclusion, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fully achieved when journalism is impartial towards politicians and corporations. The position taken by WikiLeaks to educate people about what governments are doing in disguise to protect themselves while ignoring the interests of the people who elect them. The essay also describes the use of advanced technology that will allow the user to view and share information creating social awareness of what the government is hiding from its people which can be discussed and debated overall and a justified outcome can be achieved . We can therefore exclaim that the Internet, a colossal source of all types of information, can be the new fourth state in which every aspect has a global approach.