Four Thoughts on Wikileaks

Not necessarily in this order:

• If the mainstream media did its freakin’ job, Wikileaks would be irrelevant.  The only reason this is much of a story at all is because MSM, too lazy and/or too afraid of and/or owned by “the man” to actually dig around and investigate and look for whistle-blowers on its own, is perfectly happy to have Wikileaks do their homework for them.  MSM isn’t in trouble because of the internets or whatever; they’re in trouble because they can’t do as good of a job of telling people what’s going on as a bunch of half-baked computer hackers.
• I haven’t read anything on Wikileaks lately, but I have yet to hear a “leak” that that was something that is really too surprising.  Various cables about various world leaders might be embarrassing, but I think we already knew that the people running North Korea are nuts, the people running Afghanistan are corrupt, and even that a lot of the other countries in the Middle East would be kind of okay with the U.S. putting a beat-down on Iran.  Now, if Wikileaks uncovered something like  911 being an “inside job” or how the U.S. has been secretly supporting North Korea (just to keep tensions high) or about our contact with aliens at Area 51 or whatever– if any of that happens, then we’re talking.
• I’m generally for the idea of Wikileaks, but it’s hard for me to get too far behind it in part because Julian Assange seems like a real piece of work.  Even before the rape/sexual assault charges in Sweden, he seemed kind of… I don’t know, smarmy to me.  He seems sort of like a more liberal/libertarian version of Matt Drudge, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
• Derek and I were talking the other day about how Ratemyprofessor.com and wikileaks seem to be kind of similar– reckless, based mostly on rumor and unsubstantiated reports, mixed with a twist of “the truth.”