I like to think there is a certain Voltaire-like quality to my "defenses," such as they are, of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. A letter from the faculty of the Columbia University School of Journalism sort of sums up my point of view on the Wikileaks situation:

[. . .W]e are concerned by recent reports that the Department of Justice is considering criminal charges against Julian Assange or others associated with Wikileaks.

Journalists have a responsibility to exercise careful news judgment when classified documents are involved, including assessing whether a document is legitimately confidential and whether there may be harm from its publication.

But while we hold varying opinions of Wikileaks’ methods and decisions, we all believe that in publishing diplomatic cables Wikileaks is engaging in journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment. Any prosecution of Wikileaks’ staff for receiving, possessing or publishing classified materials will set a dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity.

I frankly do not see how any true journalist could not agree with this. But "journamalists" - our Media today, are clearly different. Reporting the truth and maintaining the freedom to report the truth is not a paramount value anymore.

Consider the statement of Nick Davies, a much admired journalist for the Guardian, regarding Julian Assange:

There is one final point lurking in the background. Assange has been suggesting -- for example, in his interview with David Frost on Al Jazeera -- that all this is something to do with the fact that he and I fell out. It is true that at the beginning of August, I cut off contact with him in order to protest at several things he had done -- the first time I have cut off a source in 34 years as a reporter. This was nothing to do with the sex allegations in Sweden.

His supporters tried to brief newspapers that it was an act of vengeance on my part to go out and find this police file. That fell at the first fence, because the file came to me: I never spent a single second looking for it. As an alternative decoy, Assange suggested in his interview with David Frost, that some malign force, possibly an intelligence agency, chose me as an outlet for the file, knowing that I could be relied on to write a negative story. That also falls at the first fence. The reality is that I didn't write the story which the Guardian published. The copy which I filed was completely re-written in the Guardian office, a commonplace event in a newsroom.

Finally, I should mention what Jagger does not -- that I was the journalist who took it on himself back in June to track down Julian Assange and to persuade him not to post his latest collection of secrets on the WikiLeaks website but to hand them over to the Guardian and other news organizations. The publication of the Afghan and Iraqi war logs and then the diplomatic cables all flowed from that initiative. I did that because I think journalists should tell the truth about important things without being frightened, for example, by the government of the most powerful state on the planet.

(Emphasis supplied.) I highlighted the two portions of Davies' piece because they so struck me as incongruent. Davies' championing of reporting the truth is admirable. But the cutting off as a source a figure he deems loathsome is beyond comprehension to me. It betrays the first mission of reporting the truth.

There is a new celebratory quality to journalism that manifests itself in different ways. In the Beltway, it's being in with the government In crowd. That means sacrificing objectivity and the truth.

Davies seems to have allowed, indeed he appears to be celebrating, his belief that Assange is a loathsome figure (not about the sex he makes clear) interfere with his duties as a journalist.

Can Nick Davies be considered an objective reporter on Wikileaks or Assange in the face of that admission? Similarly Wired magazine appears to have made similar moral judgments about Assange. In an e-mail he sent to Glenn Greenwald, the entirety of which he published himself, Wired's Ryan Singel wrote of Assange and Wikileaks:

Suffice it to say I’m disappointed by your article, which I find to be warped by your allegiance to Wikileaks, which gets nothing but glowing accolades from you, despite ample evidence that Assange and Wikileaks aren’t acting in good faith.

Now whether Assange or Wikileaks are acting in good faith is an important part of the Wikileaks story, but it strains credulity to believe that a reporter who has concluded that Assange and Wikileaks "aren't acting in good faith" can present itself as, in the words of Newsweek, "objective and nonpartisan."

So what is the ethos of the New "Journamalism?" I don't think they know yet.

Speaking for me only