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That WikiLeaks went to the press with the Afghanistan war logs shows old-fashioned news organisations still have a role to play

Of all the questions raised by the Afghanistan war logs, perhaps the most intriguing is this: why would an organisation as independent-minded and disdainful of the traditional media as WikiLeakslook for these same media as partners, rather than alone?

My necessarily speculative answer is that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's made a speciality of revealing embarrassing governmental secrets, learned something important earlier this year. That's when he briefly caused a sensation by releasing video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians, killing (among others) a Reuters photographer and his driver.

Lesson: shocking material and flair for public relations might be enough to get you noticed. But if trust "You want something old-fashioned news organizations still have much to offer.

Wikileaks has made some 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan at the disposal of Guardian , the New York Timesand Der Spiegel a month ago, giving professional journalists time to sort, vet and craft narratives from jargon-laden field reports compiled by US officials.

The documents add sickening details to the broad outlines of what we already knew: that major elements of Pakistan's intelligence forces are in bed with the Taliban; that chaos and confusion in Afghanistan has led to civilian casualties; and that among the burdens the Afghan people must bear is a corrupt and ineffective government.

The Obama administration has lambasted WikiLeaks for releasing the documents, arguing that the situation has improved since 2009, when the most recent of the official reports were compiled. But no one has questioned the authenticity of the documents themselves, even if the reliability of the information contained therein appears to be of variable quality.

In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers â€" the US government's own secret history of the Vietnam war â€" to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.

In April, you may recall, WikiLeaks uploaded two versions of the Apache helicopter video. One was an edited, 18-minute version that it titled Collateral Murder, which begins with a quote from George Orwell: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." The other, 39 minutes long, was raw footage with no commentary.

The American secretary of defence, Robert Gates, denounced the video as having been taken out of context. No surprise there. But as Raffi Khatchadourian notesprofile Assange published in the New Yorker, the media turned from the road Gates 'in a few days of release. And really, if watching videos and listening to the Americans, on board the helicopter, you can see that the crew believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were beaten by legitimate objectives.

Even the comedian Stephen Colbert, in an interview with Assange, dropped his rightwing-blowhard persona momentarily to make a serious point, calling the edited version "emotional manipulation" and telling his guest: "There are armed men in the group. They did find a rocket-propelled grenade among the group. The Reuters photographers who were regrettably killed were not identified as photographers. And you have edited this tape, and you have given it a title called Collateral Murder. That's not leaking. That's a pure editorial."

(Designed for British readers who are not familiar with Colbert, and thus a surprise to me, referring to the comic: it's sad but undeniable fact that two of the most acute critics of U.S. media today can be Colbert and his colleagues forged a leading John Stewart .)

Around the time that the video was released, hubris among the WikiLeakers was thick. In the New Yorker piece, we hear from a friend and supporter of Assange's, a Dutch hacker named Rop Gonggrijp, who smugly says that "we are not the press" and "the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document".

Yet here we are, several months later, and Assange is acting very much like an old-fashioned source, seeking out journalists even as he uploads the raw source documents to the web.

In the good words of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, Wikileaks is "stateless organization news ". But as the New Yorker piece makes clear, Assange and his fellow activists are less interested in news than in making a political impact. And it is an organisation only in the loosest sense of the term. Given those realities, it makes sense for them to work with journalists rather than to posit themselves in opposition to the media.

"WikiLeaks was soaking, drowning in data," Rosen's NYU colleague Clay Shirky tells David Carr of the New York Times. "What they needed was someone who could tell a story. They needed someone who could bring accuracy and political context to what was being revealed."

I suggest that old media has won over new. Rather, I 'm just pointing out that each has its place in the ecosystem, the media.

Wikileaks, with its focus on singleminded pursuit of informants and protect their identity by using encryption and the secret, you can get the material that escapes established news organizations. A professional journalists may veterinarian interpret and disseminate the authority on this material in such a way that not all new media company (at least Wikileaks) can.

The result is a powerful indictment of the war in Afghanistan â€" and a major challenge to Barack Obama.

Back in character, Colbert asked Assange: "What is the purpose of letting the public know? It's like you're saying it's better to know than not to know. Have you not heard ignorance is bliss?"

It's way too late for that now.