If WikiLeaks is dying, then the NYT is partly to blame

You're obviously exaggerating what I said for effect, but that's the gist of it, yeah.

I didn't mention his sex crime accusations, and I only said that there's no actual evidence that the US government directly influenced Visa and Mastercard. Surely it's possible Visa, MasterCard, etc. made their decisions on their own, but I honestly don't know, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a "favor."

But for the rest, the numbers speak for themselves, and it's pretty much common sense. Everytime there's major leak, they got a ton of money. They've haven't been publishing, they're not getting attention, nobody's donating to them. From their own charts, they made more in post-blockade February '11 than they did in pre-blockade Sep '10. Again, most of their 2010 money... more than 50% of all their money came through channels that are still totally available.

It is true that they were taking in more with PayPal than through transfers before December. There's obviously no way to know how much of potential paypal donations were lost versus replaced by wire donations, but it remains that most of their money in 2010 came from transfers. In December, about 2/3s of it came from transfers. The steep drop-off from December to January in their charts has nothing to do with the blockade, right? They got 398,365.60EUR through wire transfer in December and (estimating from their charts) about 20K in January. Is that not clearly just interest from the embassy cables dying down?

They're claiming they've lost out on "tens of millions of pounds" because of this 'blockade.' That is a ridiculous number, considering they made just more than 1M last year. Somehow they expected to average more than twice that every month? Despite not publishing any new sources of material? Or even accepting any new material? Ridiculous.

This is an organization that accepted credit card payments for 46 DAYS and they're coming on like Visa and Mastercard are ruining them?

Everything Wikileaks has done since Assange started talking with Brad Manning has been hyped-up, conspiracy-theory, drama-queen publicity stunt and this 'financial blockade' is no exception.

Tell me more about this bridge you have, though.

The truth even if it causes some harm, is always infinitely better than a lie, even if it helps someone. That is my position.

> It is awfully hard to even formulate an argument that the New York Times isn't a journalistic organization.

I'll yield - doing so would set the bar so high that there would be no 'journalistic organizations'. To be useful, 'journalism' has to be inclusive, avoiding ruling out every organization based on its failings.

> On the other hand, it is not as difficult to formulate an argument that Wikileaks staff aren't journalists

Precisely because Wikileaks is so different from other journalistic organizations. It's very easy to choose from any number of simple criteria that separate Wikileaks from 'the rest', and then assert that this criterion is a requirement of journalists. But since we're classifying organizations based on what they do, rather than what they don't, it's awfully hard to exclude one which solicits information, analyzes facts, and publishes stories.

More connotations of journalism are speaking truth to power and critical analysis of the situation. Wikileaks does a much better job of the former, and the NYT has abdicated the latter.

I stand corrected. There's no proof any source has been killed, but the Taliban has repeatedly vowed to hunt down and "punish" the sources not redacted in the Wikileaks docs. Many links on that on the Web.