I haven't really gotten down into the weeds with wikileaks and Assange. Can't follow everything! But I'm starting to get a similar sense as when GooGoos were trying to regulate the hell out of blogs because we were some dangerous force that needed FEC oversight because it would be a tremendous threat to the Republic if a few websites chatted about politics and got a few advertising dollars. Also, disclosure, and too and such. Basically there were two sides to this. One was trying to impose standards and ethics onto blogs which didn't apply anywhere else in the universe, the other was that blogs were somehow "different" than this thing we call "the press" because there was this thing called the press which we could define as some Woodstein ideal which of course all press outlets subscribed to and bloggers were different. Because.
In the background was this idea that the first amendment was about "the press," by which we mean the modern publicly traded companies known as "big media" and not about a concept of the "printing press." In other word, you were a journalist if you worked for a big media company and then you deserved "first amendment protection" and otherwise you didn't.
I miss NeyNey.
