On 7 April 2011, the Rafael del Pino Foundation, as part of its Master Lecture programme, welcomed David Leigh, Head of Research at the British newspaper The Guardianwho gave the lecture "Wikileaks and Assange".
David Leigh said: "Wikileaks is clear proof that journalism is not dead. In fact, it is evidence of the emergence of a new kind of investigative journalism in which practitioners are analysing vast amounts of electronic documentation leaked onto the internet to uncover, from this data, new issues that would otherwise be impossible to bring to public scrutiny. This is a new kind of investigative journalism.
David Leigh also referred to the limits of the Right to Information in cases such as this: "In working with the Wikileaks materials we discovered some limits to what we were prepared to publish as a media outlet. We also had different criteria with regard to the ideas that the members of Wikileaks had about what could and could not be published. We, as a media outlet, were not prepared to publish personal information that could identify individuals who had collaborated with the Americans [in Afghanistan or Iraq] and therefore make them targets of possible reprisals. A second limit was clearly related to national security. There was information in these documents about certain basic infrastructures, such as oil pipelines, major drug production plants... and so on. These data had been collected by US sources. We did not want to publish this information because it could provide potential targets for terrorist organisations in different parts of the world and it was not relevant information for our readers and the general public. At The Guardian we did not publish this type of information, which was, however, published by rival newspapers such as The Timeswhen it came into their possession. This shows that there is a clear controversy in the media about what can and cannot be published and the limits to reporting that come with the use of this kind of material.
