2. CITIZEN FOUR SCREENING
◦ This week instead of having a normal lecture we watched Citizen Four for the duration of the lecture.
◦ Citizen Four is a documentary about the Snowden case. Edward Snowden leaked many things to do with the
US government and spoke about surveillance because he had knowledge of this himself having worked for
the CIA.
◦ This week I learned what a whistleblower is. A whistleblower is a person who discloses information about
wrongdoing to the relevant authorities, to to the media and general public.
◦ Whistleblowing has given us an awareness of many things:
◦ An awareness of pollution
◦ Knowledge of public health dangers
◦ Insides into financial waste
◦ Exposure of war crimes against humanity
◦ Safety standards for the products we use everyday
3. THE SEMINAR AND MY THOUGHTS
Whistleblowing happens everyday. In my opinion, we need whistleblowers. They stand for something and take
the risk! Without whistleblowers we would not know some of the information we do now, and it is in the
publics interest to know of some information, such as their private information being read. Some people want
secrecy so it is important for them to know that a lot of their information is not very secret at all.
◦ The Guardian put the Snowden story out there, but none of the other British newspapers like The Times,
The Sun, etc. defended the Guardian and portrayed Snowden as the enemy.
◦ Many of the right wing newspapers attacked Snowden and portrayed him as the enemy who went against his
country and committed an act of terrorism against it.
A question posed in the seminar was: how open of a society do we want? And is privacy important?
I feel that privacy is important because everyone is entitled to keep their personal information to themselves,
being under constant surveillance is not a nice feeling because it feels like you are constantly being spied upon
and many people are. It can lead a person to live their life differently due to fear. People should have a right to
say whether they want their information to be kept or not. However, surveillance can be good when it comes
to things like acts of terrorism taking place, then surveillance is of course useful since it can help find criminals
and so on.
4. THE SEMINAR CONTINUED
◦ We also discussed helping out whistleblowers and ethical issues that come with it. There are some journalism
codes of conduct such as protecting your sources if they need protecting. This is why some people say a
piece of information came from an anonymous source to protect them so they do not get threatened.
◦ Ethical issue override the issue of getting information out.
◦ We also discussed what we think responsible journalism is and what irresponsible journalism is. Is
responsible journalism working for the government and irresponsible journalism releasing information of
personal lives out there? Or is it the other way round?
I don’t know how I would define the two. Because some people may view irresponsible journalism as working
for the government for the publics interest but others may see working for the publics interest as part of
responsible journalism because you are not working for the government and are actually more like an
investigative journalist or a watchdog journalist acting like a guardian for citizens.
