El País wins the International Press Freedom Award for its coverage of the Wikileaks story

The publication of U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks is a "recovery of the role that the press should have in challenging power." The Director of the UNESCO Chair in Communications at the University of Malaga, Bernardo Díaz-Nosty, thus outlined the reasons behind the awarding of the International Press Freedom Award 2011 to the five newspapers that published the Wikileaks documents: El País, The Guardian , The New York Times and Le Monde and the German weekly Der Spiegel. The deputy editor of El País, Vicente Jiménez, who picked up the award, stressed that the publication of the leaked papers has shown that "it is not news and ignorance that destabilize a society, but the bad policies of bad politicians ".

Jiménez also highlighted how this episode has served to vindicate and strengthen the role of "the quality press," which "remains crucial" as can be seen in this case where "a new phenomenon such as Wikileaks hacker activism has resorted to traditional organizations, journalistic dinosaurs, in order to analyze a huge volume of information" referring to the prestige of the publications that worked with the documents and received the award at a ceremony held at noon at the University of Málaga.

According to Professor Díaz Nosty, the publication of the Wikileaks documents marks a turning point in the recent history of journalism because it confirms journalism as an essential element of democracy. "Without journalism, there is less democracy and more corruption," he said. The deputy editor of El País said that one of the lessons to be learned in the wake of the publication of these documents is that "those who defend the need for secrecy on behalf of the citizens they claim to represent merely demonstrate their distrust of democracy. " Vicente Jiménez, who said that the information and news ecosystem must now get used to new players such as Wikileaks, stressed that the leaks "open up new pathways for the press" because there is "a growing demand for transparency - one of the cornerstones of good journalism: secrets can and should be disclosed on behalf of the public interest. "

The publication of the Wikileaks cables would have been "unthinkable" a few years ago, according to Jiménez, for whom another lesson to be learned is that the same technological tools that enable governments and large corporations to control the information flowing through the internet, also make them vulnerable. He said that it was "revolutionary" that 250,000 diplomatic cables could fit on a memory stick. Though the deputy director of El País also warned that the publication of the documents may have the unintended effect of government efforts to impose greater restrictions on public access to information, he concluded that "it is a risk certainly worth taking. "

Representatives of The Guardian and Le Monde also agreed that the Wikileaks episode was a milestone in that five publications collaborated and worked on the same story at the same time. "When this sort of collaboration takes place, it leads to unparalleled quality and results and creates a group that is better able to resist attack," said Yves Eudes, a leading Le Monde reporter.

Further information

Special report on the State Department cables (in Spanish)