Wikileaks is a news organization, not an anti-secrecy organization who's First Amendment Right to Freedom of the Press has been illegally infringed upon by the US Government.
No, they publish classified documents. What they do is more akin to public espionage than journalism.
I understand people want to lionize Wikileaks and consider Julian Assange to be the modern day equivalent to Woodward and Bernstein, but to consider what they do journalism is to discredit journalism. There's a reason Edward Snowden went to the actual press and not Wikileaks.
Even better - Senator Gravel, doing his job, brought them into Congress .. something that was necessary, because the press was compromised and wasn't doing their job.
EDIT: downvoters aren't offering a response, so I'll just hope or assume that they want evidence:
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/putin-dismisses...
[3] http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.771716
[4] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/25/politics/cambridge-analyti...
[5] https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/07/28/on-weaponized-tran...
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
1. The original claim is a lie. There is no evidence of Russian corruption and the claim was made for attention or some other purpose. Remind me, again, how many lies it takes to make someone untrustworthy?
2. The original claim is true, but something or someone prevents information from being released. This is the more insidious reason. It means that the organization will only release "the truth" that jibes with the messages/agenda they want to push, which is propaganda. Regardless of whether or not Russia has a direct influence of the release is unknown, but it becomes propaganda nonetheless.
My personal opinion is that Assange is virtually inseparable from Wikileaks and appears to have a god complex, using the platform as his mouthpiece on his view of the state of things while enjoying the comforts of avoiding consequence.
Except around eight years of imprisonment now. It being a relatively nice imprisonment doesn't change what it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...
None of your links contain any "evidence".
Evidence shouldn't be difficult to explain. Loosely connected assumptions, however, are often difficult to articulate.
The argument you propose is that practically anyone who exposes corruption in western organizations could be Russian government propagandists.
If another news organization received the DNC leaks and chose to not publish them, do you think that would have been ethical?
Is your position that, one cannot be a US citizen and oppose the US government and if you do you're a Russian agent?
Julian Assange has an agenda against certain people/parties, and has demonstrably leaked things that support that, and not leaked things that refute it.
I say that as a detractor of many of the same people and institutions Assange dislikes, so check your assumptions of bias before you throw them, please.
You're right, though, that nothing actually meets that bar. It's a human institution; it's necessarily flawed. That's why you source across biases and ideologies, and correct accordingly.
The thing I'm talking about is instead the deliberate pretense of not being partisan. Fox News calling itself "fair and balanced", or claiming "We report. You decide." are just particularly egregious examples. When you aren't presenting enough of the picture for someone to form an informed opinion, you're peddling propaganda. I know the propagandist can't admit that's what he's doing, so I hold journalism to the standard of integrity of knowing, and owning, its biases.
But it's ultimately a spectrum, and it's on me to gauge where on that spectrum any given source lands. Some things are more propaganda than journalism. Some things are more or less one or the other to different degrees on different topics, at the same time. Sometimes they're at different points on the same topic, on different days, or in different stories.
It's complicated, sure. But, holding as nuanced an appreciation of this mess as I hope I've implied, I hope also that you'll give me the credit of not merely talking out my ass when I say I find Assange to be towards the propagandist pole.
Then your post is content free. If you find nothing to meet your personal standard of being journalism than you finding wikileaks to not be journalists merely means they are the same as the New York Times.
In no way did I claim, or even imply some sort of equivalence between Wikileaks and the NYT. Please don't put words in my mouth which I explicitly disclaim just two paragraphs later.
My point is more that it's impracticable to impossible to share all of our biases, not least because we aren't aware of so many of them. When we've internalized a narrative, it becomes an unconscious bias, and can't very well be meaningfully disclosed.
What GOP documents did Wikileaks receive that they didn’t release?
It really doesn't, though. You don't have to be unbiased to be a journalist, a journalistic entity, or whatever you want to call it.
Fox News, biased as it is, is still news.
EDIT: Yes, of course it's impossible to eliminate bias. To extrapolate from that to accepting overtly biased and selectively published content as journalism is unsupported, at best.
It's the selectivity of reporting that compromises the claim of journalism, not the bias. When you don't report on things that don't support your narrative, you're no longer reporting.
They're among the worst offenders, they're far from alone in playing that game.
That WikiLeaks even had a wiki.
You are the only person in this thread pushing the government narrative and taking their words at face value.
Anyone who has kept track of these persecutions knows that unmentionable facts are thrown in constantly to try and get the defendants to break. Viz, Daniel Ellsberg being called a homosexual.
I agree. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect individuals or companies from any and all prosecution.