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Wikileaks exposes everything that's wrong....with the American media

The Wikileaks saga is a hard one -- for me there's been something that's been bothering me about the episode from Day One but -- as inarticulate as I've been lately -- I unsurprisingly couldn't quite articulate it. That's why God invented Glenn Greenwald, who of course wrote the uber post on the American media sticking up yet again for the powerful instead of speaking truth to power:

Nonetheless, our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat.  And few organizations besides WikiLeaks are doing anything to subvert that regime of secrecy, and none is close to its efficacy.  It's staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least. 

In sum, I seriously question the judgment of anyone who -- in the face of the orgies of secrecy the U.S. Government enjoys and, more so, the abuses they have accomplished by operating behind it  -- decides that the real threat is WikiLeaks for subverting that ability.  That's why I said yesterday:  one's reaction to WikiLeaks is largely shaped by whether or not one, on balance, supports what the U.S. has been covertly doing in the world by virtue of operating in the dark.  I concur wholeheartedly with Digby's superb commentary on this point yesterday:

My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it's necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times. . . . .As for the substance of the revelations, I don't know what the results will be. But in the world of diplomacy, embarrassment is meaningful and I'm not sure that it's a bad thing for all these people to be embarrassed right now.  Puncturing a certain kind of self-importance --- especially national self-importance --- may be the most worthwhile thing they do. A little humility is long overdue.

Of course, some would say that the real threat from the Wikileaks' disclosures was another blow to American exceptionalism, the new hot-button issue of 2012. Perhaps. But that's not the media's job to worry about that, only to worry about that truth. A fully functional press -- now that actually would be exceptional.