David Leigh says, “Julian is staking everything on this terrific throw of the dice—that he can become the man who single-handedly rocks the U.S. administration back on its heels, and this will catapult him into making it all work again.”

The release of package three, the American diplomatic cables, on November 29, drove more than four million unique visitors to *The Guardian’*s Web site, its largest single day of traffic ever. The cables revealed embarrassing backroom bargains among chanceries around the world and brimmed with unflattering assessments of foreign leaders by U.S. diplomats. The cables also showed a wide array of Arab leaders urging the United States to attack Iran. Although the WikiLeaks partnership has in some ways been a triumph for The Guardian, it has also been a profound test of institutional patience. One night, after I tried unsuccessfully to reach Rusbridger by phone, he e-mailed at 12:30 A.M. his time to apologize for his silence. “Sorry about today,” he wrote. “Managing a relationship between a French afternoon paper, a Spanish daily, a German weekly, a paper on NY time, and a bunch of anarchists in hiding is trying!” No one knows whether Assange will attempt another partnership with so many media outlets, but he has promised that one of his next major revelations, rumored to involve the hard drive of a top bank executive, will occur in early 2011, and he has boasted that publication “could take down a bank or two.”

When I asked Rusbridger if he had any regrets about the way his paper handled the cables or the way it worked with WikiLeaks, he said, “No,” but his response was so tentative that it seemed to reveal how fragile the project was in his mind. “I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite well.”

The Guardian and WikiLeaks can be seen as the matter and anti-matter of modern journalism—each represents a pole at the farthest extreme, with the journalistic enterprise as a whole being torn between them. The Guardian sees itself as a mediating institution, one that applies knowledge and judgment to the gathering of facts. It believes mediation is necessary for understanding, and it knows that institutions must be built and tended with care. The high-minded creation of the Scott Trust, long ago, epitomizes this sensibility. In contrast, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks disdain the notion that anything should come between the public and the vast universe of ostensible information you can evaluate for yourself, if only someone will let you. The ideal role of a journalistic outlet, in Assange’s view, is to be a passive conduit for reality, or at least for slivers of reality, with as little intervention as possible—no editing, no contextualizing, no explanations, no thinking, no weighing of one person’s claims against another’s, no regard for consequences. The technology that Assange has worked on for most of his career possesses immense capabilities, and cannot be controlled by a single institution or voice. It is perhaps for this reason that WikiLeaks—ultimately replaceable by the next technologically savvy anarchist—is so disturbing to so many.

There can be convergence, up to a point. Under Rusbridger, The Guardian has embraced outside sources of information in what the editor likes to call “mutualization”—that is, using the best of what *The Guardian’*s staff can produce but also embracing the wide-open online world for what it casts into public view. This is why Rusbridger was willing to work with “a bunch of anarchists in hiding” in the first place. Assange, too, has perhaps undergone modest evolution. Originally insisting that none of his documents be redacted, he backed away from that stance somewhat when it came to the Iraq War Logs, and then backed away even further when it came to the diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has not yet released its own large cache of raw diplomatic cables; what has been made public is largely limited to what the traditional news outlets decided to make public in their stories. It may be that Assange is simply holding material out, to make other deals.) One of Assange’s former associates, disillusioned, likens Assange’s situation to the last scene in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs are shown to have become indistinguishable from the human beings they had rebelled against. Indeed, compared with others in his world of Internet provocateurs, Assange is almost a traditionalist—one of the few of his kind willing to work with the mainstream press and conform, at least fleetingly, to some of their standards.

But convergence goes only so far—there’s no reason to think that either party has shed its basic outlook, or ever will, or could. The conflict is as old as civilization itself—between those who cherish what institutions provide and those who distrust everything that institutions stand for. At the moment, in journalism, neither seems to have the upper hand—and neither can do without the other.