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that Bill Keller, the editor of the, detests Julian Assange. It is no secret because thejust published Keller's extraordinary account of his dealings with Assange, the wholeof which was that Keller detests Assange — and so, by virtue of his enmity, can allow himself the luxury of claiming ethical distance from him. Sure, Keller had to work with Assange and WikiLeaks in order to be in on the release of leaked documents and diplomatic cables, along withandand. But that doesn't mean he had toit, and that certainly doesn't mean he came away from the experience feeling unsullied. Indeed, although Keller's piece at first promised the kind of editorial hand-wringing familiar to any devoted reader of the Paper of Record, what it ended up delivering instead was a hand-washing, an act typically private but this time carried out in public, with ad hominem attack serving as an antibacterial ointment. Imagine what the Bishop of Wittenberg might have written had he been forced to collaborate with Martin Luther on the posting of the 95 Theses, and you'll get an idea of the tone that Bill Keller takes in writing about Julian Assange. He'll do it — but he'll reserve the right to hold his nose.

In this case, the nose-holding is quite literal: One of Assange's problems, according to Keller, is that he stunk. Another is that he, on at least one occasion, skipped down a city street, like Peter Pan. Another is that he wore "beat-up sneakers and filthy socks", until his cause was adopted by "wealthy admirers" who turned him into a kind of Land-Rover radical infatuated by his own celebrity, ensconced in a "mansion in East Anglia" and tricked out in the "fashionably skinny suits and ties" made possible by his "lucrative book deal" (this, in a piece that will also serve as an introduction to the Times's own book-length collection of cables and commentary). How much does Bill Keller dislike — and how fervently does he disown — Julian Assange? Well, at one point he cites, with apparent satisfaction, an editorial published by the Times of London that called Assange "a fool and a hypocrite," marking the first time in recorded history an editor of the Times of New York has permitted himself to relish an attack carried out by a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.

But Keller's glowing reference to a News Corp. editorial is typical of a piece that boasts of his moral superiority to his own sources and materials, and so seems intent on arguing that one can be half-pregnant, at least if one is the editor of the New York Times. Keller even succeeds in condescending to one of his collaborators and the conclusions it drew from the leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan: "The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties... underscoring the cost of what the paper called 'a failing war.' Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in The Times, many of them on the front page." No, the Times won't get fooled again... because according to Keller, the Times didn't get fooled the first time. So consistent is Keller's condescension, and so incessant is his pulling of journalistic rank, that by the end he winds up condescending to the very enterprise that he started out defending: "I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.... Frankly I think the impact of WikiLieaks on the culture has probably been overblown."

So why did the Times get involved with Assange and WikiLeaks — or, in Keller's pointed words, "an organization like WikiLeaks" — in the first place? Well, of course, there is the inarguable matter of the public's right to know, which operates as both first principle and failsafe in any accounting of journalistic ethics. But that's just the j-school boilerplate in Keller's piece, which is, from beginning to end, an exercise in ethical exceptionalism — a demonstration that for all its pretensions of being one of the professions, journalism is and must forever remain an ad hoc practice, with its ethics improvised in response to circumstance, and tending, like the odds at a casino, to favor the house. Unlike medicine and law, journalism does not hold itself accountable to a bar or a board of actionable standards, and that's what its practitioners love about it, if they're honest with themselves. But what Keller reveals in his Assange piece is not honesty but rather an inadvertent belief that he is the board and bar, by virtue of his elevated and unassailable position. He is at pains to say that he does not regard Assange as a partner, but rather as a mere source; but what he really wants the public to know is that he is not like him. What Bill Keller really wants the public to know is that when he climbed into bed with Julian Assange, he made sure to wear a condom, manufactured from the impermeable rubber of his own distaste.

FOSTER KAMER: Julian Assange and the Real Failure of WikiLeaks

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