WikiLeaks An Enemy to Democracy, Linguistics Professors

Somebody leak Julian Assange a dictionary already.

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant would like to see Julian Assange indicted for crimes against etymology because “Wiki” means “fast and democratic” and “leak” refers to when “someone on the inside of an institution voluntarily releases information,” but Levant says the site is undemocratic and the U.S. diplomatic cables it's published were stolen. It’s a good bet that all leaks would be defined as “stolen” by the organization that didn’t authorize their release, but nevertheless, Levant is miffed at being misled by Assange’s misuse of terminology. “It’s not wiki. It’s not leaks,” he declares.

Whatever else WikiLeaks has exposed, it has revealed newspaper bias, writes the Globe and Mail’s Norman Spector. This isn’t necessarily sinister, he says, just evidence of the fact that between the raw data and the printed story human beings make many decisions. But the example Spector uses — contrasting coverage by the Guardian and the New York Times of a WikiLeaks document about Hezbollah — provides an extraordinary example of how two sets of journalists can draw nearly opposite conclusions from the same information.

The Toronto Star’s James Travers writes that Washington should be concerned that it wasn’t able to prevent the document leak, even though it mostly confirmed things most of us already guessed. Fair point, but from there Travers gets positively unintelligible, slamming the U.S. government for failing “to adequately safeguard common knowledge” (who would they be guarding information from if it was already common knowledge?) and then, unhelpfully, channeling Donald Rumsfeld. It’s “impossible to know everything we don’t know about the leaks,” he writes, before advising “those who failed to wrap their open secrets in enigma ought to look hard at how WikiLeaks is successfully hiding its mysteries.” Um, of course.

The Ottawa Citizen editors, along with many other commentators who finished their columns before noon today, condemn Assange for threatening to unleash potentially deadly information should he be prosecuted for sex crimes charges leveled against him in Sweden. Indeed this was alarming, but today he turned himself in to police voluntarily. So disaster averted, but his erratic threats won’t do much to quell concerns that very sensitive information is being held by a very unpredictable man.