Julian Assange is no journalist

It was to this speech, and this wildly overblown comparison, that my mind wandered when watching Assange’s seemingly endless media tour to promote Wikileaks Afghanistan document dump. The mild, sallow-faced whistleblower who routinely dismissed corporate media propagandists was now to be found on NBC News, telling Andrea Mitchell that the release of the Afghanistan documents was like the opening of the Stasi archives. Assange, it seemed, was something of a specialist in the obscene, historically illiterate analogy. But trawl through the fetid swamps of the blogosphere and you will find countless paeans to this paragon of New New Journalism, a man whose name is frequently preceded by the adjectives “brave” and “heroic.”