My answer is he’s a lot more. News is in danger, and news isn’t a person, it’s a process, which desperately needs protecting. The element of that process that is most in peril is the source, and for all his sins, real and alleged, Julian Assange has been one of the most extraordinary sources of the new millennium.

WikiLeaks enabled spectacular disclosures of official secrets — from war crimes, torture and atrocities on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan to corruption in Kenya and Tunisia, the latter a catalyst of the Arab Spring. His jailing is the latest event in the ferocious reprisal against a decade of digital whistle-blowing — which has never, to my knowledge, yielded information that was inaccurate or unimportant — and that has now produced little but misery, banishment or imprisonment for the people who tried to force officialdom to come clean.

So we’re in a chilly time for whistle-blowers. While the digital age is endlessly permissive in propagating falsity and racism, authorities are uncompromisingly harsh when the information is accurate, important and inconvenient. Now that Mr. Assange is in British hands — awaiting extradition either to Sweden or to Washington, where he has been indicted on a charge of coaching one of his sources, Chelsea Manning, on how to get access to government secrets without detection — it’s a good time to consider what he has done and been accused of, and what that says about the embattled state of journalism.

Let’s recall some facts of importance. In 2010 — and this is when the sin for which Mr. Assange has been jailed was supposedly committed — WikiLeaks provided some of the world’s most respected news organizations with accurate information of deep public importance that exposed outrageous, even murderous, wrongdoing. Mr. Assange then submitted — perhaps gracelessly, but submitted nonetheless — to their editorial judgment as to how much of that information should be published and in what form. This included a vast trove exposing the American war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan as killing many more civilians than our government had ever acknowledged. A further batch included a huge number of reports from our own diplomats on the corruption and double-dealing of foreign governments.

Pretty good stuff, on balance. Still, there’s little sympathy in the media for the idea that jailing Mr. Assange is a violation of First Amendment press freedom — while there’s broad agreement that prosecuting the news organizations that published the material he provided would be unthinkable. This is bolstered by First Amendment jurisprudence that encourages a myopia that holds expressive freedom in the news realm to be the exclusive property of professional journalists. At first glance, this makes no moral sense: If the handing over of secrets can be prosecuted, why should the publication of those same secrets be protected?