Dear Diary,
I signed up for this job thinking I was a right thinking defender of fearless press freedom. I'm still signed up.
So The Globe, of which I am a part, particularly its editorial board, is coming to grips with the WikiLeaks leaks, and we're not sure how we feel about it. On the one hand we have Margaret Wente, fearless editorialist, who regards Julian Assange as a jerk. The evidence for the opinion isn't clear, but the opinion is unequivocal. Then we have Doug Saunders at the other end of the spectrum - or maybe not - who describes Assange's views as "government is conspiracy."
Somewhere, there's a middle ground, and the middle ground at The Globe always works out to Assange and WiliLeaks being a danger to the civilized world. How can this be?
It's a problem I deal with every working day that I'm not working for Thomson Reuters, Reuters being the organization that has been trying for years to get the helicopter video that demonstrates unquivocally that unarmed Reuters correspondents were machine gunned from the air in Baghdad, along with other civilians, the Reuters FOI application being unaccountably slow, but rendered irrelevant by the WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video, without which we wouldn't know anything, just like the Abu Ghraib pictures would have been meaningless without their publication by the New Yorker. The publication of both was illegal.
Help.
