I won't dispute that someone like Assange is good to have around, but I'm not sure I would ever consider him the best journalist in the world. Part of being a good journalist is looking at the motivations of your sources and looking for and examining the information you're not getting as much as the information you are. To accept and release everything uncritically while also hiding sources reduces some of the useful information that people would use to slot that information into where they think it should go.
For example, if CNN were to start regurgitating information directly provided by Google's or Apple's PR departments without criticism and people found out, they would be justifiably upset with those organizations for failing to do their job. That's why it's important that information from those entities is attributed to them.
That's not to say I think confidential sources should be outed, just that Wikileaks ended up inadvertently scrubbing a lot of this information from the data presented. Presenting everything you have is a noble goal, but only really works as intended when it's what you've uncovered yourself, and not what someone else gives to you.
Employment and salaries in journalism have dropped precipitously.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/347691-matt-lauer-and-and...
https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-news-anchor...
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/don-lemon-chris-cuo...
Also not exactly salary but the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> “The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world. Without Trump or the pandemic, the path to $50 million is significantly harder. Since February, the magazine has brought in about 10,000 subscribers a month — roughly analogous to its growth rate before the pandemic. Meanwhile, its retention rate for existing subscribers is about 75 to 80 percent, Thompson said. The net result, according to Thompson’s presentation, is not growth. It’s a static or slightly declining subscriber base.”
> the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> $50 million
$50 million is not a massive budget.
Now a days, it’s become a circle jerk on who can get the most twitter likes, they follow and retweet people of their same political side, get multi million salaries, have zero idea of what the common peasant is going through, journalists sit in their ivory tower and look down upon the peasants for not doing the same “sophisticated” things. Smugness and being condescending is a norm in journalist circles.
The best journalist of modern world is rotting in a prison cell in the UK being extradited to the US while the journalists carry water for politicians and how mean tweets is somehow a threat to their press freedoms of lies. They lie and flip flop on all issues and then when the facts come out, they act as if they were never wrong and corrections are printed ignored by everyone, damage is already done.
"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive." - Michael Malice