The WikiLeaks cables that the Fairfax newspapers have been reporting these past six days are not on the WikiLeaks website yet. There's Cairo, Caracas and Casablanca, but no Canberra.

Many thousands of cables, both fascinating and boring, from US embassies are available on WikiLeaks mirror sites (the main site is down) but there are none from the Embassy in Australia. These were given exclusively to Fairfax.

This is presumably in keeping with the time-honoured PR practice of giving one newspaper a scoop to ensure the story gets a good run. It's a type of manipulation well known to all spin-doctors.

And once again it worked like a charm. The Age and Sydney Morning Herald have splashed on WikiLeaks stories six days in a row, beating them up mercilessly even as they petered out. When was the last time a newspaper gave one of its competitors six front-page leads in a row?

Mind you, Julian Assange and his organisation need all the help they can get at the moment. They are in the crosshairs of some of the worlds most serious and dangerous people - American spooks.

The first two stories last week in the Fairfax papers were about Kevin Rudd being a control freak and saying that the war in Afghanistan scared the hell out of him. They were actually quite interesting and arguably worth the page one lead, even though everyone knew he was a control freak and anyone with any brains is scared about that war. But it was news because it felt like the truth, unadorned by the usual spin.

Day three was poor Mark Arbib being exposed as a source for the Americans in the Embassy. The headline in The Age hinted darkly at Cold War treachery: "Arbib a secret US source".

The relevant quote supporting the headline came from an embassy profile written in 2009, which said: "He understands the importance of supporting a vibrant relationship with the US while not being too deferential. We have found him personable, confident and articulate. He has met with us repeatedly throughout his political rise." Others were mentioned as well, but Arbib was nailed in the headline.

The most explosive thing in this article was a combination of paraphrase and quote: "In October 2009 ... Senator Arbib openly canvassed emerging leadership tensions within the Government, telling US envoys that Mr Rudd wanted 'to ensure that there are viable alternatives to Gillard within the Labor Party to forestall a challenge'."

If that's true, it may well qualify as a secret being passed to a foreign power, since hardly anyone knew it at the time. But then again it might have just been Senator Arbib's opinion, since no viable alternatives to Gillard were actually found. It's hard to know because we can't read the cable.

Day Four was the second-hand information (someone told someone who told someone else) that BHP Billiton had lobbied against Rio Tinto's tie up with Chinalco. This was widely known at the time, but not confirmed, and is not remotely surprising.

Day Five (Sunday) produced the unsurprising headline that the sodomy charges against Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia were a set up. This came from Singaporean intelligence, via the Australian Office of National Assessments, and then onto a US Embassy cable.

The same story also contained the revelation, also from Singapore intelligence via ONA, that Anwar "did indeed commit the acts for which he is currently indicted".

The headline went with "Sodomy charges were a set up", rather than "Anwar committed sodomy". It could have gone either way - both were in the story.

Day Six (this morning) is the news that our intelligence agencies are afraid that Israel might launch an attack on Iran, leading to a nuclear war. Aren't we all?

So we have had a six-day extravaganza of page one leads in one company's newspapers from leaks re-leaked by a website dedicated to the publication of leaks.

Under "How Wikileaks Works" on the website it says: "We are fearless in our efforts to get the unvarnished truth out to the public. When information comes in, our journalists analyse the material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society. We then publish both the news story and the original material in order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original source material themselves."

Except, that is, in the case of Australia, where it is first handed to Fairfax to be varnished.

Without wishing to be too gruesome about it, this feels a bit like a parasite that deliberately keeps its host alive while harvesting its blood.

WikiLeaks is part of a new wave of content platforms, citizen journalism and institutional websites that are bypassing and destroying traditional media companies.

Newspapers used to have an oligopoly on the dissemination of text and pictures, but now the original sources of news can publish it themselves, directly. Most of the time it's PR material, sometimes it's pictures and blogs from the front line and sometimes - as with WikiLeaks's US Embassy cables - it's state secrets.

The world is changing rapidly and unpredictably, but here's a prediction: this time the material was given to a few newspapers first so it would make a splash; next time, or perhaps the time after that, it won't have to be.

Alan Kohler is the publisher of the Business Spectator and the Eureka Report, as well as finance presenter on ABC News and presenter of Inside Business.