ABSTRACT
This article discusses the ethical dilemmas involved in using WikiLeaks as a source for critical reporting. On one hand, WikiLeaks has provided news organisations with useful material for their reports, but the ethical dilemmas arising from publishing this material with—in many cases—unknown sources, remains a problem. Using framing analyses inspired by the work of Robert Entman, the stories about Afghanistan published after the leaks in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten are compared to other news stories from Afghanistan in the same period. The samples in this survey are picked from both the online and the print version in order to get as many stories from Afghanistan as possible. All the stories were placed in pre-defined frames. The findings may also be seen in the light of earlier content analyses of the Afghanistan coverage in selected Norwegian media. The study concludes that the impact of WikiLeaks has been more significant for the framing than in the choice of topics. It seems that stories based on the WikiLeaks source tend to have a more critical narrative than other articles about Afghanistan when the topic is related to civilian casualties.
