Boundary Maintenance and Interloper Media Reaction

In his fictional story “The Interlopers”, Saki tells of two men fighting over the rights to a wooded hunting land. While both have long claimed the right to the land, one holds the legal right and the other—the interloper—claims to belong (Saki 1930). This story forms the allegorical locus of this paper, examining the way a self-defined in-group of traditional journalism protects its perceived professional identity against entities—Interloper Media—who claim belonging. This is achieved through distinct processes that echo but diverge from traditional boundary maintenance. This paper argues subtle and nuanced language in news texts referring to WikiLeaks serves to invalidate WikiLeaks' extant and persistent claims of “being” journalism. These processes differ from boundary maintenance processes related to phone hacking, which serve as inwardly focused self-policing of the profession.