IN DECEMBER 2010, Time magazine announced its 'Person of the Year'. This tedious and archaic exercise would have been quickly forgotten were it not for the fact that the winner was Mark Zuckerberg, the man with 500 million friends—and for a rumour that he had only just pipped Julian Assange to the post. The American comedy show Saturday Night Live quickly responded. In the sketch, an indignant Assange hacks into a saccharine Zuckerberg announcement from deep in the English countryside—where he is under house arrest, after having turned himself in to face the remarkable charge of "sex by surprise". As befits a man who has just survived a massive transnational witchhunt, he sits in a high-backed chair, a glass of brandy in his hand and an expression of imminent doom on his face. Then there's the satire: the character playing Assange occasionally smiles, a mistake that the real Julian Assange would never, ever, make. (Earlier this year, a video clip surfaced of Assange snaking his way across an empty dance floor at a nightclub in Reykjavik; dancing, yes, but dancing morosely.)
"What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Let's take a look," the mock Assange says. "I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's man of the year."
It is something of a relief that mainstream American media has got beyond discussing whether WikiLeaks is a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing. But curiously, the first wave of doubt has been replaced by a tsunami of fawning certainty. This newfound adoration of Assange is less evident in America, whose government has been the recipient of the majority of WikiLeaks' attention. It is, however, a sunrise industry in India. Not a day passes without news anchors and newspaper editors genuflecting before the God of All Things. The Hindu, Times Now and NDTV are among those swooning; though, oddly enough, it was just eight months ago, that NDTV decided not to run the Radia tapes for fear of spiking their editorial Kool-Aid with "raw data". It's redundant to ask whether these venerable organisations would hold WikiLeaks in the same giddy esteem if the leaks exposed the secret failings of the world's largest democracy instead of the most important one. But never mind these contradictions; the oracle is now in the house. Only recently, I switched on my television to find a journalist breathlessly asking Julian Assange to explain our relationship with Pakistan—to us.
COMMENT