Wikileaks took advice from media outlets

formfeed writes: According to the AP (through Google News), Wikileaks isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the other way around: "only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material" are they releasing it themselves. These Newspapers "have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents"

AP questions whether Wikileaks will follow these redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this "extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization"

Extraordinary?

[LauraScudder]

Perhaps only in scale. Or are they really expressing surprise that any journalists are dirtying their hands by working with big bad Wikileaks? There wouldn't be any news if journalists insisted on only talking with the kind of people you wouldn't mind your daughter bringing home.

The really interesting bit is this:

Kauffmann of Le Monde said there was no financial agreement with WikiLeaks.

"Never has anyone asked to pay anything, and if they had, we probably — certainly — would not have done