[cilantro]

Assange's antics have turned me off to Wikileaks to the point where I will have trouble taking anything they publish at face value. He is doing a disservice to the transparency movement. It's pretty remarkable that someone can be both a paranoid recluse and shameless attention whore, but Assange pulls it off quite well. Wikileaks would be much better off with someone both low key and competent like Clay in charge.

[mcantelon]

Like his style or not, he's been fairly adept at generating press. Someone low key might not be capable of doing that.

[cilantro]

The press wikileaks was getting before Assange emerged from behind the curtain was far better than it is now. They seemed poised to become the reuters/AP of primary source data. Now that seems almost impossible.

[Nwallins]

> the reuters/AP of ...

Unintentional irony? Both of those organizations' reputations have become quite tarnished. They are certainly not contemporary bastions of fair-handed transparency -- witness Reuters' photo manipulation and AP's quote-whoring.

[eli]

No organization is 100% perfect, but AP/Reuters is a far cry from wikileaks in terms of journalistic integrity. Did you read the New Yorker profile on Assange? He doesn't even claim to be objective. He talked about selecting audio for the "collateral murder" clips to maximize emotional impact.

[cilantro]

I'm unfamiliar with those incidents. So sure.

I was of course using them as examples of a reference news service or the closest thing we have one in this age. Wikileaks was in a position to become such an institution. One that no one could ignore. That does not seem very likely anymore.

[grandalf]

You are completely missing the point. By becoming a bit of a public face he reduces the chance that he can be portrayed as a fugitive, etc. If there are dozens of articles about his antics, people have heard of him before they hear his name in an announcement that he was apprehended for terrorism.

[cilantro]

That's a pretty thin pretext and it only covers a fraction of the behavior I'm referencing.

[grandalf]

What behavior is most concerning to you that's not categorized under "publicity stunt"?

[Alex3917]

He's paranoid for good reason, governments have a long history of killing whistleblowers. Just look at what happened to David Kelly.