"The court martial of the man who may have put U.S. military secrets in the hands of Osama bin Laden started today, the so-called WikiLeaks trial."
This is, indeed, the prosecution's point of view, but there is as yet no persuasive showing that that there were any militarily useful secrets, or that they got into the hands of Osama bin Laden. For major networks to call it the "Wikileaks trial," is misleading, since Wikileaks is not on trial -- but it is, very likely, targeted by the U.S. government.
ABC News gave a similarly slanted, 15 second report on the trial, headlined: "Bradley Manning Wikileaks Trial Begins." The Drudge report just calls the whole thing "Wikitrial."
Detailed comment on mainstream media coverage, its failings and biases, is available from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, fair.org) on the FAIR blog.
This Military Trial
Threatens Basic American Freedom
Writing in the New York Times on March 13, celebrated First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said in an op-ed column, in reference to the Manning case:
"And what could be more destructive to an informed citizenry than the threat of the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole for whistle-blowers?"
Abrams, who represented the Times in successfully defending the paper's constitutional right to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was arguing that Manning's guilty plea to a set of charges that could put him in prison for 20 years should be sufficient for the government's needs:
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