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46 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 311 (2011)
A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate

handle is hein.journals/hcrcl46 and id is 315 raw text is: A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate Yochai Benkler* [I1t is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck- rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.' Wikileaks was born a century after President Theodore Roosevelt deliv- ered the speech that gave muckraking journalism its name, and both hailed investigative journalism and called upon it to be undertaken responsibly. In 2010, four years after its first document release, Wikileaks became the center of an international storm surrounding the role of the individual in the networked public sphere. It forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. The freedom that the Internet provides to networked individuals and cooperative associa- tions to speak their minds and organize around their causes has been deployed over the past decade to develop new, networked models of the fourth estate. These models circumvent the social and organizational frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the balance between freedom and responsibility of the press. At the same time, the Wikileaks episode forces us to confront the fact that the members of the networked fourth estate turn out to be both more susceptible to new forms of attack than those of the old, and to possess different sources of resilience in the face of these attacks. In particular, commercial owners of the critical * Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Univer- sity. I am grateful to Bruce Ackerman, Marvin Ammori, Jack Balkin, David Barron, Fernando Bermejo, David Isenberg, Susan Landau, Micah Sifry, Jonathan Zittrain, and Ethan Zuckerman for comments and criticisms. ' Theodore Roosevelt, Address of President Roosevelt at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Office Building of the House of Representatives: The Man with the Muck-Rake (Apr. 14, 1906), available at VoICES OF DEMOCRACY, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/theodore- roosevelt-the-man-with-the-muck-rake-speech-text.

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