Every entity working a PR angle emphasizes their own ethics. That's not unique.
Does whistleblowing really need a gatekeeper?
Most of the leaks, the really ground breaking stuff, was done by other people more worthy of praise: Maning and Snowden. Assange is basically in the business of running a website and promoting himself, whilst antagonising people who actually support and believe him.
What bothers me the most, is how biased Wikileaks are. Sure, the U.S. does a lot of f'ed up stuff, but they are by far not the only players in the game.
I haven't heard that one, actually. It's probably the same anti-intellectual assholes who will praise e.g. Gates or Zuckerberg, et al, for dropping out of college to do some 'real work' too, rather than staying in the ivory tower or whatever.
Let me help you off your high idealistic horse and say, that it could be the case, that people do not actually want to attack the topic, but care for it. It might be the case, that these people see Assange as a liability to actual whistleblowing and a useful idiot for more authoritarian players out there.
He centralised whistleblowing in the public's mind, whereas it should be decentralised by definition.
However, the first time I heard of Wikileaks was after the 2007 election in Kenya when there was a significant change in the vote, suddenly, due to documents leaked there [0]. There are plenty of other examples where the US government was not the one being "attacked" but that is an early example, if not the first, which brought Wikileaks to the world's attention.
Maybe the US only seems to be the main target because it is US citizens who are most empowered and/or motivated to leak those documents to Wikileaks in the first place.
And sure, Manning is worthy of praise, but the point of Wikileaks presenting the information was to keep Manning anonymous - it was his own confession to Lamo at Wired which got him in trouble in the end. I don't see what Snowden has to do with it - does he have any formal relationship with Wikileaks? Other than fighting alongside each other for a similar/the same cause, and speaking at events together etc. I don't know how that is relevant. Wikileaks has had value to the world and hopefully will have a further positive impact in the time to come.
[0] http://www.dw.de/wikileaks-website-offers-promising-outlet-f...
The new wikileaks is not about leaks, it's about a particular agenda set by Assange.
Simple: he's an intelligent, charismatic individual working on and for the defining issue of our generation.
Like it or not, these issues need faces to humanize them. He's good at that.
A. The majority of Wikileaks' leaks are not related to the U.S. at all. Wikileaks is hardly biased.
B. Assange is directly responsible for the creation of Wikileaks and indirectly responsible for dozens of spin-offs. Hundreds of major cases of whistelblowing probably never would have happened if it weren't for Assange. So yes, wistleblowing needs Assange.
C. Assange set himself up to be the scapegoat. He's sacrificing himself for a greater cause. Your analysis of his motives are insulting.
But you really think, that the whistleblowers were just held back, because they didn't have a website to post their stuff to?
Furthermore, if Assange wanted, he could easily spread the leaks anonymously and be quite persistent about it. That would actually preclude him or anyone else of being a martyr. Sounds like a win-win to me, unless, of course, you want either to stroke your ego or follow your own political agenda.