There aren’t many certainties in life, but here is one: writing any public piece about Julian Assange or WikiLeaks will result in tweets, blog posts and reader comments labeling you a US military apologist, US-hater, Communist, feminist, man-hater, naive dupe or tool. It’s not unusual to be two or three of these things at once, just as it’s not unusual to be called the same thing by WikiLeaks haters and supporters alike. Write a piece about how WikiLeaks has made an important contribution to the de-mystifying of state power? You are an “Assangenista.” Wonder if the WikiLeaks line on feminism in Sweden has been harmful and counter-productive? You are a CIA agent.

Lost in this social media whirlpool of bullshit, innuendo and de-contextualized half-truths, however, there exist some fundamentals of which we need to remind ourselves from time to time: (1) a human being is sitting in prison in the United States for 35 years for the crime of blowing the whistle on likely criminal acts committed by the US government; (2) the force with which the US government went after Manning indicates how seriously they will take any case against WikiLeaks; and (3), the grave implications of the Manning verdict, combined with any future case against WikiLeaks/Assange, for both US and international journalism. In other words, how WikiLeaks forces us—still—to re-consider relations of power between state, citizen and media. (For a great perspective on the role of WikiLeaks in global power geometries, see Sami Ben Gharbia’s piece on Tunisia and the Arab Spring.) These are the issues I have attempted to focus on in my writing on WikiLeaks.

But what do we get? Well, two years ago I made the following observation:

While castigating Assange for generating a cult of personality around himself, journalists have, ironically, played a large part in contributing to that process precisely through their focus on personality, and not the substance of Assange’s fears regarding extradition to the United States, or WikiLeaks’ contribution to a greater understanding of the murky worlds of military action and diplomatic geopolitics.

Obviously, very little has changed. The recent piece by Andrew O’Hagan is the latest installment in a story that, quite frankly, I assumed had run its course long ago. There were some interesting issues raised in his piece (such as Al Jazeera offering to buy information), but how many pop-psychology analyses of Assange are enough before the trope simply implodes? Yes, he’s a global figure, he’s important, he’s played a part in throwing gas on the media fire surrounding him. He’s vain. He’s smart. He’s flawed. I think we get the picture. I’m no fan of the inverse, either: the “I-Met-Assange-For-45-Minutes-And-Now-Here-Is-My-Positive-Analysis” article. To me, this form of defense simply serves to legitimize a thin genre of reporting where the personal overshadows the bigger political-economic picture.

The myriad stories on the Assange personality raise an interesting (and critical) question: if the justification for the focus on the Assange personality is that he is a global figure with a certain degree of power, then where are similar analyses of the CEOs of, for example, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemicals or Smith & Wesson? What? Not global? Not powerful? We were treated to a wide range of reports on the psychology of Chelsea Manning during and after her trial, but I must have missed the similar multiple analyses of Eric Holder, his management style or ideology.

In the end, my critique isn’t really about the stories themselves, but about consistency in the ways in which power is understood and confronted by the news media. We now know a great deal about the life, motivations, finances and peculiarities of Assange. Fine. But if we keep the lens there, and do not interrogate, in a similarly critical fashion, other actors with far more economic and political power than Assange (including those exposed by WikiLeaks), then we see only one small component of a much larger, complex picture. And that’s a disservice to WikiLeaks supporters and opponents alike.