WikiLeaks: opinion & fact

The challenging thing about commenting on a fast-moving news story is that you commit your thoughts to print, publicly, and then things keep moving. So it is with Wikileaks and boy, did I learn my lesson when I blurted out an opinion-on-the-run earlier this week only to be met with howls of protest that it wasn’t well researched enough.
I’m not going to repeat that mistake. With Julian Assange arrested last night on rape charges, this story continues to ‘move forward’ at the kind of cracking pace that would even impress Julia Gillard.
SO.
We’re going to publish a few excerpts of some relevant stories with links to the originals so you can read up for yourself. There are a huge number of extreme and nuanced views on Wikileaks, Julian Assange, freedom of speech, whether Wikileaks is actually journalism, whether the rape charges are a witch hunt, the responsibility of the Australian government to protect our citizens and on and on and on….

We’ve chosen these excerpts to give a variation in these views so you can form your own….and then change it as more facts emerge if you wish…..

Julian Assange wrote this for The Australian:

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Read the full article here.

Writer and commentator, Luke Walladge wrote Julian Assange is not your friend, published on ABC’s The Drum this morning:

We don’t need to know the details of confidential diplomatic cables. There is a reason why the US president has a national security briefing every Monday morning, and you and I don’t. There is a reason why Cabinet proceedings in Australia are in confidence, and you and I are not a party to it. In a representative democracy, we invest trust in individuals to make decisions on our behalf, with the knowledge some decisions will never be known to the public.

Confidentiality is not corruption. Exactly what moral cause does Julian Assange pursue?

The full article can be found here.

Todd Gitlin writes  Why Julian Assange is no Daniel Ellsberg for CBS News today.  He says in part

I don’t see a convincing way to feel anything other than agnostic about the impact of Wikileaks—specifically about how much damage the latest data dump will do. Choose your expert opinion. Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski are unfazed. Hillary Clinton is sternly censorious. Joe Lieberman is—Joe Lieberman. Speculation is cheap—so cheap that everyone and her uncle can afford it.

You can read the full article here

What is your opinion about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange given these new developments?

Please also add in any links to article you think we should be reading.