[edit: I see a few people disagree with this. Care to respond rather than simply downvote?]

In case you haven't been following what has been going on. The NY Times published a tabloidesque hit piece on Assange, and has failed to defend Wikileaks on the basis of journalistic freedom.

It's pretty clear that the Times management consists of war hawks who oppose Wikileaks b/c of their neoconservative political beliefs and desire to please those with political power.

Think about when the last time the NY Times published any remotely controversial investigative journalism... oh yeah it was the articles that supported the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Strangely, the Times (a good but ardently neoconservative) paper still manages to fool progressives into thinking that it offers a sympathetic voice. Sadly the pressures of competing in the online world have left the paper with no choice but to sell off its journalistic integrity year after year.

If anything, one would hope that a paper like the Times would have taken a skeptical but journalistically sharp look at the leaked info and would have held off on the ad hominem attack on the Wikileaks founder, at least until some evidence was offered in support of the allegations against him.

And no, I don't think the total buffoonery written by Krugman, Dowd, and Herbert counts for any progressiveness points. If anything the three are a sideshow act with no relevance to the issues that matter.

I think the theory is that WL was a competing news organization with the potential to replace NYT, but NYT hasn't rolled over and died, therefore blocking WL from taking its seat on the throne.

Agreed - it seems like more of a failed attempt at a namedrop, when more of the "blame" should be directed towards the public. If Times readers as a whole lose express interest in WikiLeaks while Assange is dealing with legal issues and many other whistleblowing sites (OpenLeaks.org as an example) haven't seem to been releasing any high-profile documents, isn't that just more the reason for the Times to focus efforts elsewhere?

As the author of the post, maybe I can try and clear that up: my point was that while we have all failed to some extent -- by not supporting WikiLeaks and protesting things like the PayPal blockade and Amazon deletion and the government's dubious case -- the New York Times has failed by not using its national media platform to protest those things and their impact on free speech and freedom of the press. And my argument about why they didn't do that is in part that the NYT sees WikiLeaks as competition. Hope that helps.