> It is rather sleazy that they tried to portray Assange as a self-obsessed, egomaniacal cult leader of some kind.
It is still sleazy if there's element of truth to that? Cult leader, maybe not, but his ego is visible from the ISS, and his narcissism is fairly hard to miss as well.
Likewise Assange is certainly intermingled with harm/death to Americans, if not directly involved. He claims there are higher reasons such as his effort to foist transparency on the U.S. government in particular, but you don't leak hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and still end up Doing No Harm.
Additionally it was Assange's mistakes that left the archive of unencrypted unredacted documents on a public web server in the first place. The Guardian journalist should have been just fine to publish the password years after the fact as the FTP share used to push the documents to the journalists doing the analysis was not required to be public for years! So again, although Assange is not "the sole gunman" here he does share in the responsibility.
And all of this now reaches back into why it might be appropriate to describe Assange with cult-like descriptives. You ask a U.S. Democrat and they'll probably be able to list at least 5 things they don't like about a prominent Democratic politician. Even a Republican would be able to list faults with their politicians.
But to hear people describe Assange, he is almost literally perfect, has never done something wrong, makes snap decisions that are revealed to have been 100% beneficial years later, and never suffers from normal human misunderstanding or flaws in decision-making. Where does this come from?? I screw up something at least twice before breakfast every day, but any fault people point out with Assange must be as part of a vast government and media conspiracy to discredit him? OK, sure...