Supposed I'm biased against you and I report that you hacked into Bob's computer and I have evidence to prove it. I paint that to make you look like some kind of cyber villain and neglect to report the important fact that Bob asked you to do it.
If the reader knows about my bias towards you then they know to take my reporting with a grain of salt because even if it is true, it might not be the whole story.
You are right of course, it is important to know the bias of sources which is why so many fact checking sites popped up after 2016. Before then I would always go wikipedia for unbiased information. Sadly we live in a time where the majority of news papers has a clear and sometimes publicly stated political leaning and bias. Often this can be traced through ownership since many are now owned by the same entity.
If the emails and documents was leaked today then hopefully fact checking sites would be all over it and pulling it apart regardless who originally published them. I do recall a few people were looking at checksum and correlate statements to previously public information, but nothing news worthy came out of that.
In my opinion, having followed WikiLeaks over the years, I think it's safe to say that they have an anti-western intelligence/military bias. That doesn't mean that what they publish is untrue. It just means that I'm skeptical about their motives and sources when they release something and I make it a point to try and find a good counter-balance to their take on the issue. Because they probably only presented a tiny portion of the truth that fit their agenda.
The War documents leak established them in international news, which change wikileaks tactic to more editorial style. This then resulted that they got the cable leak the next year.
After this there were internal fighting, blocking, ddos, economical blockades, volunteers being detained at airports and a lot of intelligence agency taking a lot of interests. The new "editorial" style also meant that they now held on to leaks rather than publishing.
And then we had the Swedish investigation and all that mess. Calls for assassinations, "enemy combatant", drones, diplomatic back channels, all contributed to a very antagonistic/paranoid relation between the US government and Assange personally. At this point there is nothing resembling the original style of wikileaks. I see it less like a "anti-western intelligence/military bias", but rather a anti-Hillary/US government bias.
I can't disagree with that.
Then there are things like the Vault7 leaks, which were stoked by teaser announcements and theatrics. And while they did contain some surveillance tactics that seemed interesting they mostly contained tools and internal communication that was clearly sensitive and generally not information that the public even cared about (their exact code obfuscation algorithms?).
The net effect is that most people didn't care much while anti-western intelligence groups probably had a field day.
And given the sophistication to obtain the data it likely came from a nation state in the first place wishing to accomplish exactly that goal.
There's no way they didn't realize what they were doing. They played part in an attack.
Meanwhile Assange yawns at the Panama papers...
The content here is raw emails from prominent Democrats discussing things like cheating in debates to favor Hillary Clinton, telling each other about how Hillary Clinton has really bad judgment, and an orchestrated campaign with friends in the media to discredit her primary challenger.
There can't really be any "bias" in this kind of primary source information. What would you argue here? That candidate Sanders wanted this to happen? We already know from Donna Brazille's book that this is all true, and there is no other side of this story.
Would you argue that folks like Neera Tanden were emailing wisecracks about Hillary Clinton's poor judgment (while publicly saying the opposite), is somehow mischaracterized? Contrast this with how the RNC treated their frontrunner - they publicly criticized him at every opportunity, and nobody rigged the RNC primary to favor candidate Trump - in fact, they did the complete opposite rather publicly, all but endorsing his opponent.
If equivalent information was in the RNC's emails, it was not brand new information to the public, because they were saying those things in public about their candidate, while the DNC did it in secret.
On the third hand, Assange spent time suggesting that the information definitely didn't come from Russia, and suggesting it might have been Seth Rich. But information came out the shows that he was talking with Guccifer 2.0, who was widely suspected (at the time!) to be GRU and if he wasn't, was meant to be a Romanian hacker, not a DNC whistleblower. So there's at least tenuous evidence that Assange was willing to both work with Russian intelligence and rope in an entirely unrelated death to muddy the waters on where the info came from.
Going by my earlier comment - I would coordinate with the Satan to release true information, the source of the information does not necessarily contaminate its truthiness. Publishing true information, as a hypothetical whistleblower organization, is my hypothetical raison d'etre.
This only ever becomes suspect if I am selectively publishing, or if I am aware that I am selectively publishing.
In this case there needs to be evidence of either. Conversations with biased parties are not evidence unless they clearly state that the selective publishing is known.
It's also extremely important to realize what exactly the voters learned from the emails. CAP President Neera Tanden, and a prominent figure in HRC's campaign, expressed sharp criticisms for her favored candidate's judgment. DNC Chair Donna Brazille emailed privately about how the statistical job growth under President Obama was essentially a "technical" win, but had very little impact on people's lives. She also went on to leak debate questions to her favored candidate, exposing one of hundreds of different instances of a party-wide effort to sabotage the primary process.
Contrast this with the RNC primary. Virtually the entire party leadership loathed then-candidate Trump. As opposed to rallying around him, they actively rallied against him. In October there were discussions of replacing him on the ticket. Even at the convention, Ted Cruz reportedly went off-script and asked attendees to vote their conscience, as opposed to voting for candidate Trump. The divisions in the GOP were laid bare for the world to see. The divisions in the DNC stayed hidden from voters. Voters only learned much after the election that Donna Brazille contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton with another candidate after she fainted on 9/11, an event that ironically followed weeks of mainstream media outrage against "right wing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's Health", which also included a pickle-jar opening gag on a late night talk show.
What truths would Wikileaks have exposed about the RNC that weren't already publicly known? Is this an empty box containing any convenient allegation?
One of the USA's major political parties sabotaged the primary process, engaged in debate cheating, media manipulation and bird-dogging, all for a candidate whom many of the party's own leadership found wanting in terms of judgment. After all this - the outrage seems fixated on the messenger, Wikileaks, as if their alleged selective leaking somehow absolves the Democrats of these monumentally disgusting actions.
If you look at the election from the perspective of damage done to candidates - the sheer volume of substantiated negative press received by candidate Trump makes it really difficult to argue that voters could have somehow heard something else from the RNC's emails that would changed their minds about him.
What? There's plenty of evidence. Wikileaks consistently published information damaging to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the election, and published zero information damaging to Trump.
What is a normal reaction to be publicly declared a murderer and enemy combatant (with an implied statement to be droned) for publishing documents from people involved in the US military that wanted to give the public information? In the context of what he perceive she has done against him, what is the likeliest outcome if he comes into contact with damaging information and a request to publish it? "No thank you, only if you provide equally damaging information on her opponent or else it will look bad?".