I have been following the WikiLeaks story with growing concern, but when News.com.au came out with their story entitled Inside Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange's Lair I became hot under the collar. What? The heading doesn't say that? Oh yes, that is right. The original story broke this morning but was edited heavily at 12:00 today to correct some of the "facts". Even so there is still the URL which captures the original title: http://www.news.com.au/features/wikileaks/inside-wikileaks-founder-julian-assanges-lair/story-fn79cf6x-1225968685673 and the line at the bottom:

Hey Julian, does Blofield do your decorating?

Compare the WikiLeaks base with these two Bond villain lairs:

So here we go. Take what is not a story, that WikiLeaks has (or rather had) servers hosted in a data centre (as Spike Milligan once said in character as Eccles in answer to the question "Why are you here?", "Everybody has to be somewhere") and try and spin it up into a piece that compares an individual with a fictional evil mastermind.

The original version did not mention that the Pionen data centre was owned by Swedish ISP Bahnhof, and instead tried to intimate that Assange himself was responsible for this "Secret lair". Secret my arse. The entrance is in the centre of Stockholm, off a main street. But that aside. We now have to seriously question the journalistic integrity, or even the level of journalism involved in such a sham. The story did not need to be told, it has no place in the dialogue, and is not of interest to the public. Worse it tries to create a link that doesn't exist. Is this the depths to which our "professional" journalists have sunk? Give me the blogosphere any day. At least most know to fact check them.