Popularity of WikiLeaks boosted by News Corp's sloppy journalism

Julian Assange and his controversial whistle-blower forum, WikiLeaks, have received support from the majority of voters who participated in an online poll conducted by Essential Research and published by Crikey in December last year. The poll discovered that 80 per cent of Greens voters unreservedly approved of WikiLeaks with only 30 per cent of voters across the political spectrum saying they were against the organisation.

At the TEDGlobal talk in July last year, host Chris Anderson told audiences that since its launch in 2006, "WikiLeaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world's media combined".

The whistle-blower forum has broken several controversial stories including the operating procedures of Guantanamo Bay, the collapse of the Kaupthing Bank in Iceland, toxic waste dumping in Africa, as well as leaking footage of a Baghdad airstrike which killed Iraqi civilians and a list of censored URL's in Australia.

What makes Wikileak's achievement all the more impressive is that it is a not-for-profit organisation operated by only a handful of trusted staff.

Compare this to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation that employs thousands of staff members across multiple publishing platforms in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Australia. In February this year, News Corporation's second-quarter earnings were valued at $US1.29 billion, up 81.2 per cent from last year.

While News Corporation has been willing to print stories generated by WikiLeaks, they didn't break the original stories - despite having access to an abundance of resources that WikiLeaks does not.

This is not to say that News Corp hasn't leaked a few good stories themselves, including the BER issue that came to light last year, but why aren't more of these important issues being delved into by the organisation?

Mr Murdoch has the large cheque book, so he either isn't providing the resources to his company, his journalists aren't trying hard enough to access these stories or alternatively the company is trying very hard to conceal this information and is succeeding.

Whilst there has been much debate as to whether Julian Assange is a journalist or not, the reality is that he is making news, sharing major stories with the public that News Corporation has failed to cover. Journalists like David Conley have criticised Mr Assangefor not treating the raw data that he obtains, 'journalistically'. However, this may be one of the reasons why Mr Assange has received such widespread support. Most of the news supplied by WikiLeak's is untouched. Whether it is raw data or an official letter, Mr Assange doesn't excessively interfere with the information. He purely provides the information and allows the readers to make their own judgments, rather than distorting the information to suit a particular angle; as Mr Murdoch's publications have done to stories in the past.

Some would argue that Mr Murdoch is just the face behind the corporation, not the journalist, and therefore should not take all the blame. To a degree this is true, he isn't the journalist writing the stories, but evidence suggests that Mr Murdoch has more to do with the content of his newspapers than one may think.

According to Roy Greenslade, a journalist for The Guardian, duringthe lead up to the Iraq war, all of Mr Murdoch's 175 newspapers which spanned across three continents, supported the invasion. With so many different editors from different backgrounds and countries, one would think there would be a healthy variety of opinions; however each publication was unanimous in its support for the war. According to Greenslade none of Mr. Murdoch's journalists "dared to croon the anti-war tune."

Furthermore, whilst Mr Assange shares stories about the dumping of toxic waste in Africa which led to the hospitalization of thousands, Mr. Murdoch's idea of front page news, concerns the reality cooking show, MasterChef. Sure you can have a slow news day -however MasterChef is produced by Elisabeth Murdoch's company the Shine Group. Just another coincidence?

It's no wonder why the Australian public is so supportive of Julian Assange, despite him having no formal qualifications in journalism. At the end of the day WikiLeaks is spreading hard-hitting news, whilst Mr Murdoch's publications often consist of stories that are spoon-fed to suit a certain political persuasion, or personal Murdoch affiliation.