It's not quite the grovelling apology we were looking for, Barrie, but it will do for now

ABC1's Insiders on February 20:

BARRIE Cassidy: Is there a bit of paranoia now in the government about News Limited? In your private conversations with ministers you must pick up a frustration with The Australian in particular.

Fran Kelly: Yeah, and not just industrial relations. I think the government understandably feels that there is a campaign being run against them in News Limited. If you pick up the front page of The Australian on Friday, my impression was that every story, but perhaps it was three out of four, were very detailed anti-Rudd stories. There is no doubt about it, they are taking a hard line at every point, harder than the Fairfax press.

Cassidy: It's a cause on The Australian's part. It's an ideological position.

Cassidy on ABC Online's The Drum yesterday:

YOU have to hand it to the Americans. They were on to Kevin Rudd long before most of his colleagues and most of the media. So many of the observations made so sharply by former US ambassador Robert McCallum from November 2009 didn't occur more generally in Australia until much later. The cables did refer to "control freak" tendencies and "persistent criticism from senior civil servants, journalists and parliamentarians that Rudd is a micro-manager obsessed with managing the media cycle rather than engaging in collaborative decision-making". But the facts are, very few public servants, journalists and parliamentarians, apart from Coalition MPs, were publicly critical of Rudd to that point. Check the record. The ambassador was either drawing on private conversations he had had with people in the political industry, or he was impressed with the views of a small but prescient minority. One of them was John Lyons, from The Australian, who made similar observations in a well-researched article on Rudd's office, called "Captain Chaos".

Ashamed of my country. John Pilger on ABC 702 yesterday:

JULIAN Assange has not had the proper protection of his government, which he deserves. I'm shamed by it.

Adam Spencer: What's the possible benefit of WikiLeaks? It's one thing to argue that it's not harming people, but why is it good for us?

Pilger: I take it that is one of those devil's advocate questions. You can't seriously be asking me as a journalist why the free flow of information is good for us. I don't think people need that explained to them. Jefferson said that information is the currency of democracy and if we don't have that free flow of information, there is no democracy. There is no opportunity to call politicians to account. I can assure you, I am an investigative journalist. It shouldn't be private information that governments lie through their teeth to the rest of us and lie so much that they're able to start wars that lead to the deaths of large numbers of people. The release of many of these cables, this is information that is powerful to all people and to which they have a right. I repeat, to which they have a right. That's the reason why. And we shouldn't really need to have that spelled out again. If we need that spelled out again, then something's happened.

Journalist Chris Uhlmann with Jon Faine yesterday on ABC 774:

THE US is among the most transparent countries on earth. I don't think Julian Assange would have lasted long if he was producing cables out of Russia, for example, or China.

Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

THIS brief glimpse into how the government actually works is actually reassuring. The cable extracts are often sharp, smart, candid and penetrating. Who knew the US government had so many talented diplomats?

Bloomberg report:

RATHER than exposing ineptitude, a reading of a fair portion of the documents suggests that they actually reflect well on US policy and diplomacy.

Daniel Drezner in Foreign Policy:

I'M willing to be convinced otherwise, but it strikes me that these leaks show other governments engaged in far more hypocritical behaviour.

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