WSJ Piece Tries to Downplay Impact of Wikileaks Story

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal tried to put its own spin on the recent Wikileaks story.  The paper, who was not offered advanced access to the material, paints the whole exercise as a publicity stunt and suggests that Wikileaks was simply frustrated with past attempts to get attention and just wanted to raise the site’s profile.

“WikiLeaks, frustrated at the lack of splash of recent leaks on its whistle-blowing website, has rolled the dice to try to raise its profile by teaming up with news organizations in its latest dump of classified documents.”

via WikiLeaks Sought to Raise Its Profile – WSJ.com.

To characterize the single largest publication of classified war documents as a publicity stunt is disingenuous at best.  Julian Assange, the site’s front man, is putting himself in great personal danger to get this material out.  This is not some trivial ploy for publicity but rather a major milestone in the development of 21st Century journalism.