WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks at a press conference in London in October. A U.S. official says Assange is a 'political actor' and not a journalist. (Lennart Preiss/Associated Press)

WikiLeaks' release of classified U.S. Embassy cables this past week has sparked an intense debate on whether the online media organization's actions qualify as journalism.

The website's founder, Julian Assange, has portrayed himself as a crusading journalist: He told ABC News by email that his latest batch of State Department documents would expose "lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil," The Associated Press reports. He also told Time magazine he targets only "organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behaviour."

Some U.S. officials don't see it that way. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley accused Assange of being a "political actor" with an agenda to undermine international diplomacy, the Economic Times reports.

"He's not a journalist. He's not a whistleblower," Crowley said Thursday. "He is a political actor. He has a political agenda."

News organizations and editorial columnists have waded into the argument. Some commenters, like the Zimbabwe Independent's Dumisani Muleya, support WikiLeaks' efforts.

"From a purely journalistic point of view, WikiLeaks did a great job," Muleya wrote. "The release of the files represents the triumph of investigative journalism. The breakthrough is a victory for probing journalism, which leaves no stone unturned despite the attempts by government to conceal information and the truth from citizens on the pretext of national security."

Others, like conservative columnist Ezra Levant, say that what WikiLeaks does is not journalism.

"Stealing state secrets and then publishing them to our enemies in a time of war is not journalism. It's espionage," Levant wrote in the National Post on Friday. "If that's difficult to grasp, then consider if WikiLeaks had hacked into a bank computer to steal customers' credit card information and then published that on the internet. Journalism? Free speech? Of course not -- theft, breach of privacy, and perhaps fraud, too. The speech part isn't the pith and substance of it; the theft is."

With files from The Associated Press

What's your take? Do you think WikiLeaks' actions qualify as journalism? Has the public benefited from the release of the classified files? Let us know in the comments below. 

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