In the run-up to the Iraq war the BBC was very much a mouthpiece for the UK government.

As a rule of thumb you can use any news service as a source of information as long as you don't use it for information about the government of the country where it originates from and the major adversaries of that government or country.

That makes reading the news and staying current a lot harder and probably will require you to gain language proficiency beyond what you can get at through the English language press.

So what? How is this relevant to the discussion? We're not talking about whether state-sponsored media is a bad idea (I think it is, too!) We're discussing the question of whether Wikileaks has weird ties to Russia. Its founder and leader has a show on Russia's state-sponsored propaganda network. That is, in fact, a tie to Russia.

We can debate whether it's a meaningful or indicative tie. That seems like a live debate. But "the BBC was a mouthpiece for the Iraq War effort" isn't germane to this discussion. I agree that it was too. Believe it or not: it is possible to (a) oppose the Iraq War, (b) believe that it was disingenuously sold to the American and British people through media manipulation, (c) oppose the NSA, and (d) still think Wikileaks is suspicious and untrustworthy. I fall into that a-b-c-d bucket.

You're focussing too much on the messenger, focus on the message.