Don't shoot the messenger

Be critical of him always. But to shoot the messenger is only to distract from the message — and speaks more of the character of the shooter than it does the messenger.

In this case, following the leak of 40,000 classified Iraq War documents Friday by WikiLeaks, the shooter(s) are the establishment media, specifically the New York Times. The messenger, naturally, is Julian Assange, WikiLeak's founder.

It is human nature to attack when viable, logical means of approach have been exhausted or simply do not exist — fight or flight. If a viable, logical critique of the man behind the release of thousands of Iraq war logs existed, I'd like to think the Times would have found it. After all, it is the role of media to be critical, as they are of Assange. But because that viable, logical critique does not exist — the authenticity of the documents is not in question — the critique is nothing more than sensationalized, tabloid "news" regarding irrelevant matters of Assange's private life.

Corporate media have been increasingly flailing in their role as government watchdogs since Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers, and arguably even before (though comparison with the current situation paints a rather rosy, nostalgic picture of 1971). The Times was the first to publish the Pentagon Papers, on its front page. Today, rather than publishing excerpts from the Iraq war logs and further exposing government corruption, it is in the midst of waging its own war against Assange, the man.

The outlet that ate the Pentagon Papers right up in 1971 has moved to the other side, taking down the very breed of whistleblower it once celebrated. Fittingly, the comment by Dan Ellsberg in his talk Wednesday at Ithaca College which keeps repeating itself in my mind is that the Patriot Act has made legal each one of Nixon's security breaches in his campaign to discredit Ellsberg, which were illegal in the '70s.

Also in that case, the unquestioning yet powerful establishment media are to blame.