Are WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange re-raising the journalistic bar originally set by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate debacle?
The Woodward and Bernstein team fearlessly reported on and released information that eventually lead to the resignation of the President of the United States. As a result, the duo has been heralded as the best journalistic team of all time. They set the gold standard of what it meant to be a journalist.
However, when WikiLeaks releases diplomatic and military cables that uncover even greater wrongs committed by our government than the ones carried out by President Richard Nixon—we label them as a treacherous and anti-American cabal. However, this defamatory talk is not just coming from our government; it is coming from the Mainstream Media themselves. Time Magazine’s writer Joe Klein wrote this, “I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.”
I cannot help but think that this sort of fiery talk from the likes of Klein and others is based entirely on a childish-professional jealousy. Every journalist who is proud of his or her profession, regardless of his or her personal political bent—deifies the Woodward and Bernstein team for what they were able to pull off. However, after slogging it out in the pressroom for twenty-plus years without a Pulitzer Prize sitting on their mantle, some journalists are put off by the fact that a computer nerd from Australia (Assange) can consistently scoop them.
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