by R.J. Giuffre

Created on: December 08, 2010   Last Updated: December 09, 2010

Over the course of the past several weeks there has been much debate over the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. The website—a part of the “alternative media” which is a source for information often referred to as the new press—has published on the internet, hundreds of thousands of documents which had been leaked by whistle blowers from inside several governmental agencies. Those agencies, mainly of the US Government, have been quick to condemn Wikileaks for such publication.

The US Government as a whole has attacked Wikileaks, claiming that the website’s publication puts the lives of American servicemen at risk. Senators have called to declare Wikileaks a “Terrorist Organization” or at least called for designating the website an “Enemy Combatant” because of the nature of its postings.

The Mainstream Media has been has been on a coordinated blood-hunt, searching for any scrap of dirt with which to smear Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, while at the same time profiting from reporting on the revelations made by the leaked documents published by the website.

This just shouldn’t be.  The corporate owned Mainstream Media has long ignored, maligned, attacked, and in some cases consumed and corrupted this new incarnation of the digital age called the Alternative Media. It is the survival instinct of the Mainstream Media to somehow find a way to consume or destroy any threat to their dominance. But that is where the problem begins.

The Mainstream Media has abandoned their post as the Fourth Estate—the unofficial branch of the government which was meant to keep in check the power of the government by holding it accountable to the governed buy way of informing the people of their actions—choosing instead to concentrate on corporate profits over the public welfare. This wasn’t a problem when there were hundreds of independent media companies, publications, broadcasters, and distributers—when it was illegal for one company to own many media outlets, especially in the same market. Once ownership of the media was deregulated by the government, allowing massive corporations not only to own multiple media outlets, but to own several of them in one market, these massive corporations swallowed up all local news outlets. In just a few short years this nation’s media was allowed to be swallowed up by a handful of powerful companies, and the government not only allowed it,

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