From files on corruption in Kenya to classified reports from the U.S. State Department, WikiLeaks posts it all. The site aims to create complete transparency, leading many to herald it as a voice for the oppressed.

Subsequently, this has earned WikiLeaks countless awards, including The Economist’s 2008 New Media Award and the 2009 Amnesty International U.K. Media Award.

Even Time Magazine has stated that this could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.

Any injustice can be exposed to the global community on the site and any government can be held accountable. All it requires is one person to blow the whistle on it.

You might recognize the website from its release of the Afghan and Iraq War diaries earlier this summer. These “war diaries” essentially chronicled nearly every action of the U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the time, security officials believed these leaks would endanger U.S. security forces greatly and undermine foreign policy. Yet, three months later, these documents appear to have caused little actual damage, besides being rather embarrassing to the U.S.

The website is releasing more than 250,000 U.S. embassy cables throughout the next few months.

Several hundred of these already have been released, with more coming out everyday. These cables are communications between embassies and include many frank observations from diplomats as well as daily interactions at the embassies.

These most recent leaks have garnered outrage from all of the political pundits. Sarah Palin has tweeted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down like the leaders of al-Qaida and the Taliban. I suppose that means we will take 10 years to find him.

Furthermore, 2008 U.S. presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said the person who leaked the information should be executed for treason.

Other news sources have gone on to question if WikiLeaks is a terrorist organization. Amazon even went as far as to remove WikiLeak’s servers from their web service.

The most shocking thing surrounding the WikiLeaks scandal isn’t the content of the leaked materials, but the disappointing response from politicians and the media.

There are more than 250,000 of these leaks, meaning if one read 50 cables everyday, it would take nearly 15 years to finish reading all of them. By sheer volume, the cables disqualify themselves.

No one will ever read anything outside of a mere handful of these cables, but thanks to the constant hyperbole used by politicians and invective language of pundits, WikiLeaks and the cables have received all of the free press it ever could want.

The very figures who spoke out against the site have given credence to documents that probably would have been buried in the constant ebb and flow of the Internet.

Nothing makes better headlines than the manufactured fear and outrage of an invisible enemy.

In this case that enemy is a huge intelligence leak and what a terrorist could do with some outdated reports that mostly consist of candid remarks about foreign nationals. You know, real scary stuff.

When the Pentagon Papers, the 70,000-page secret document detailing the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to the New York Times in 1971, they too supposedly were going to endanger national security.

This release also was “dangerous” and led to a lengthy lawsuit with the New York Times. Yet here we stand 40 years later, just fine.

Journalism should be edgy and dangerous. The media is intended to rein in the government and ensure accountability.

Injustice is given a permanent foothold in American society when it becomes complacent and stops doing its job.

The responses I see from most professional journalists have been downright disappointing. Instead of investigating, they have fallen back to renouncing an organization that merely a year ago they were praising. How quickly the winds seem to change.

Matt Manning is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at mannin84@msu.edu.