"Is Assange a journalist at all? That’s where the argument usually begins, and too often ends. As NYU law professor Stephen Gillers points out in his penetrating and essential new book Journalism Under Fire: Protecting the Future of Investigative Reporting, the most far-reaching federal shield law proposed in recent years to protect reporters—the Free Flow of Information Act, introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham in 2013 but never passed—explicitly wrote WikiLeaks out of the equation, denying protection to outfits whose “principal function” is publishing “primary source documents…without authorization.” The dividing line, says Gillers, is “editorial judgment”: What defines WikiLeaks as non-journalism is that it is an undiscriminating document dump. For years that same argument has allowed many traditional news organizations to keep their distance from WikiLeaks’ overtly activist publishing."