If all goes according to plan, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will make a cameo this Sunday on “The Simpsons,” and soon after he will begin hosting a television show on a Russian state-owned network called RT. It is possible to see both necessity and farce in his involvement with these projects. Assange’s appearance on “The Simpsons,” if it provides a ratings boost to the show, will put money into the pocket of its broadcaster, Rupert Murdoch, whose paid commentators have called for unspecified commandos to execute Assange by hanging, or to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” And the Kremlin is hardly a bastion of government transparency. In the past decade, forty journalists have been murdered in Russia, and in a majority of those cases no one has been prosecuted. Assange once told me, approvingly, that the Swedish Internet service provider that had been hosting WikiLeaks was also maintaining a pro-Chechen separatist Web site that had been “taken down twice from diplomatic pressure from Russia,” and was still sustaining regular cyber attacks.

But these are strange and difficult times for WikiLeaks. The Web site once drew power and freedom from its untouchable, mote-sized budget, and now it insists that a financial “blockade” has crippled it to the point of near oblivion. Assange has spent more than four hundred days under house arrest, a number that is still rising, and his ability to develop WikiLeaks appears to be as constrained as his physical movement. Is now the time for a forty-year-old cyber activist to sell out?

To sell out, Assange would of course have to violate his ideals. Maybe he has, but it would be wrong to confuse the romantic view that he holds of the world with a rigid commitment to ideology or unwavering idealism. He is a charismatic figure precisely because of the way his contradictions—manifest in WikiLeaks from the start—magically seem to hold together: his self-absorption tempered by his more abstract, but genuinely felt, pursuit of justice; his inexperience or naïveté often masked by his autodidact’s intellect; his utopianism hemmed in by a do-what-it-takes view of combat; his search for hidden truths shrouded by his own secrecy and willingness to equivocate, if not lie. “When you are much brighter than the people you are hanging around with, which I was as a teen-ager, two things happen,” Assange told me while I was reporting “No Secrets,” a profile of him and of WikiLeaks that ran in this magazine two years ago. “First of all, you develop an enormous ego. Secondly, you start to think that everything can be solved with just a bit of thinking—but ideology is too simple to address how things work.”

WikiLeaks supporters will have to decide for themselves whether joining up with the Kremlin is pragmatism taken too far. But the program, titled “The World Tomorrow,” could do Assange some good. He has said that it is “an exciting opportunity to discuss the vision of my guests in a new style of show that examines their philosophies and struggles.” Putting aside whatever financial and intellectual benefits Assange gets from these discussions, “The World Tomorrow” might help him make the case that he is a journalist who can—and does—work within the ambit of conventional media. If he were ever prosecuted under the Espionage Act, this might have legal implications. Then there are the journalistic lessons. How will he manage the show? Will he invite contentious guests who might storm off the set (as he once did on CNN) if his questions are not to their liking? Will he bring on a leading Kremlin critic to speak out? Will the interviews be edited? If they are, will full transcripts or uncut versions be posted somewhere online, to meet the WikiLeaks standard of “scientific journalism,” by which the raw source material of a journalistic endeavor is made public? It is often said that a good talk-show host knows how to listen. Will Assange be any good at that?

Lately, Assange has been sparing with his media appearances; his legal troubles have brought to the surface a contentious side of his temperament that does not reflect the whole of who he is. He has a wry sense of humor. He can tell a story and lose his way in it. He can pursue a series of questions in conversation, not knowing where they are precisely going. If the show is going to be successful, its producers will have to find a way to bring that out of him.

When I first heard “The World Tomorrow” announced, I thought, for some reason, of an odd little story that he told me about being in Denmark, in 2009. At the time, the United Nations Climate Change Conference was being held in Copenhagen, and many activists were protesting it. The police, in response, had acted severely, making mass arrests and openly beating unarmed people with truncheons in front of news cameras. Assange had told me that he suspected the police abuse was worse inside jail than it was on the street, and that he wanted to document it. “I have my Chinese spy camera and all I need to do is make sure I get arrested and smuggle this in,” he said. “I had read ‘Papillon’ and I had read that the prisoners kept cash in rectal repositories. I got together with an Australian cameraman, and we found out where there was going to be a morning protest, and I wrapped my Chinese spy camera in a condom, and rectally deposited it, and taught myself that I am definitely a heterosexual, and a bit uncomfortable, and so now I just need to be arrested with other people.

“So I got to the demonstration and a bunch of protesters are there all wearing the same colored clothes—mostly women, but some men—and these guys were handing out free veg sandwiches and books, and they were really toning down the mood, and making it hard to get arrested. They were unchallenging to the police.