By Justin Raimondo
"We keep hearing there’s nothing in the WikiLeaks cables we didn’t already know – this from people who, more often than not, are frothing at the mouth about Julian Assange’s alleged “treason” and “anti-American” villainy. Of course, if these cables are no big deal, then the charge of having done great harm to the American empire rings hollow.
These folks are not interested in making an honest argument: they merely want Assange’s head. As Glenn Greenwald has noted, with great disgust, many of these people are journalists, of one sort or another, who have put themselves in the position of defending the keepers of official secrets: the idea that the public has a right to know anything except what our rulers want them to know is utterly alien to them......
This is an effort to salvage the gate-keeper role of the legacy media, but it’s a futile rearguard action that will flop spectacularly, as it deserves to: the whole idea of the internet, the sheer beauty of it, is that we don’t need gate-keepers anymore. Technology has rendered these witch doctors obsolescent, which is one good reason for them to hate WikiLeaks with such abandon. Assange is threatening to revoke their meal ticket, and they’re fighting back tooth and nail.
It’s only natural that a government-directed campaign to discredit – and supplant – WikiLeaks, and split its supporters, should enlist those poor doomed creatures we call “journalists.” The seemingly curious spectacle of the media leading an open attack on the First Amendment gives new meaning to the journalistic axiom that one must always protect one’s sources. A lot of good it will do them. Like King Canute, they command the tides to recede, and still it rises. "
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