I have read several times now a book called Open Secrets, a story of government in action told through the release of classified information mostly by one Bradley Manning. In the opening, Bill Keller tells how he and the rest of the people involved in deciding what information to print and what to leave out. He says they were aware that Julian Assnge "clearly had his own agenda" in contacting the newspapers that were to publish the material, one the Times and Guardian were suspicious of. For that reason, and to protect the lives of people mentioned by name in the cables from various diplomats around the world, some of the material was censored by the publishers, though still retained by Wikileaks. There will always be questions about how successful that review was, or how important it may have turned out to be, since Wikileaks published some of the things that were left out.
Now comes the story by the Associated Press about Hillary Clinton's schedule in the State Department, a schedule the AP had to sue to get, and new claim by Assange that Wikileaks will go after anyone who does harm to one of its sources as a result of information passed to them. The Times did not carry the AP story, but did publish one that showed the "transparency of the Clinton Foundation".
We accept too easily the notion that newspapers and television outlets are owned and operated by political people with their own agendas, similar to those of Julian Assange. We used to have a free press, the kind that made Watergate a well known term. It is unlikely that we would see a scandal of that dimension repeated by the Washington Post or the New York Times which would have to overcome internal bias beyond description. That is why Wikileaks has not gone away in spite of considerable efforts on the parts of many to see it happen.
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