There can be no comparison between on the one hand the reactions of politicians, and on the other that of journalists and reporters regarding the activity of the WikiLeaks website and its leaks, as well as in terms of personal feelings towards the website's founder, Julian Assange. Indeed, concern and unease, and perhaps also rejection, condemnation and denunciation, are all reactions that were voiced by politicians from different parts of the world, with a mixture of “theorizing” about political intellectual property rights and about the interests of countries, nations and peoples that could be harmed by openly publishing official documents. As for unease and perhaps “disgust” at our friend Assange, it was the prevalent sentiment of the majority of politicians in the world. Some did not conceal their relief at his being accused in a molestation case in Sweden, and their wish for him to obtain a verdict that would deter others, as a molester of women or of politicians, governments and heads of state. Completely on the opposite, journalists and reporters welcomed the leaks and the website's activity, and started eagerly waiting for new documents that would be revealed later. Newspapers and television shows competed in publicizing every document revealed by the website, and in turning every message from an ambassador to a minister, or opinion put forward by a US official or received from an official in a “slumbering” or emerging nation, into a scandal that deserves to be discussed and debated, in terms of its reasons and of ways of activating it and reporting it to all those who did not know about it. Assange has turned into a symbolic figure among journalists and reporters, so much that many of them have found him to be a role model for all those working in the business of looking for trouble, one that they should take pride in and emulate, and one whose footsteps they should follow in. Those reactions are the same in the developed world and among third world countries, including Arab countries, with a few differences. Most prominently, reactions seemed less acute in democratic countries, on the part of officials and government on the one hand and on that of journalists and reporters on the other, perhaps because secrets there are not many, or because the peoples of the developed world receive information through the media in massive quantities. The case is different in the third world, where obscurity is the basic principle, “filtering” or even banning information is an established practice, and concealing facts is quite common. This was perhaps one of the reasons for the state of “amazement” that prevailed among some Arabs after reading documents that are in essence only messages from ambassadors of the United States in some Arab countries to government administrations in the US, holding the points of view of those ambassadors on some facts or on the conduct or the policies of some Arab officials and nothing more. Thus “amazement” turned into surprises for even some Arab politicians, not to mention journalists and reporters. In a later phase, the surprises turned into hopes of other documents being revealed, or more accurately other documents that would make known the impressions of this or that US ambassador of this or that head of state, or the opinion of the US embassy in a particular country of the internal situation in this or that Arab country. This is in addition to the “punitive” measures taken by the governments of some Arab countries against journalists and reporters who “overstep their boundaries” or who are clearly “privileged”. Indeed, the issue of “concealing” information remains the most prevalent problem facing the media, as well as the one with the greatest impact on its work. The issue is in fact not limited to the desire to ban a certain piece of information or to conceal a specific secret, but rather lies in the fact that senior officials do not believe in the right to know and in the nature of the work of the press and other media. This is one of the main problems faced by journalists and reporters, in addition to the feeling of some officials that this profession is based on “meddling” and “slander”, and on implicating this or that official in problems that could force them to resign from their positions. In addition to this, there is the issue of officials mixing up the opinions of authors with the information they might obtain and publicize, or mixing up the addressing of specific issues by authors with their political stances. As for the demands for an Arab Wikileaks, it falls within the framework of wishes that are not viable, not only because measures would be taken against those who would dare publish Arab documents, but more importantly because Arabs prefer not to keep documents in the first place – and if they do happen to keep them, they would not be documents that hold first rate secrets. That is because people in the Arab World know and are well aware of the secrets of their rulers, even without leaks.
