While the journalism Wikileaks enables is important, for its founder, Julian Assange, it is incidental. In the US itself, Ron Paul, a Republican, spoke up for WikiLeaks in Congress, warning the Obama administration that “lying was not patriotic". Not only does the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg think of Julian Assange as a remarkable investigative journalist, so do politicians as different as President Lula of Brazil and ministers in Angela Merkel’s conservative government in Germany. If you read the pages of The Guardian or Der Spiegel or The New York Times it becomes obvious that WikiLeaks has acted as an enabler of responsible, investigative journalism, not as a crazy media vigilante.
At the time of writing, exactly 1,897 cables had been published by the WikiLeaks website, nearly all of which had also been published by its media partners. The truth is that WikiLeaks has shared copies of these quarter of a million cables with four mainstream papers and has only published those cables that have been edited, selected and redacted by those newspapers and magazines. Tertius Pickard/APįor example, hostile critics constantly refer to the indiscriminate “dump" of 250,000 diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in November. Protest 2.0: Hundreds march to protest the detention of Julian Assange in Brisbane, Australia.