>You're assuming that the accuracy of the information Wikileaks releases is crucial to its influence or credibility It did real harm to Dan Rather and CBS's cr

>You're assuming that the accuracy of the information Wikileaks releases is crucial to its influence or credibility It did real harm to Dan Rather and CBS's credibility when they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy Wikileaks' position is even more precarious than theirs since unlike CBS they own no distribution channels. If the mainstream media choose to ignore them then they're toast. >I submit that Wikileaks is more influential because of political bias This doesn't even make any sense: the average Trump voter and Assange do not see eye to eye. >Many Americans have been trained to mistrust the mainstream media They've got plenty of reason to mistrust them but that doesn't always stop the truth from being believed. What has trained them to mistrust the mainstream media in any case, is lies. If they care about that (and all evidence points to the contrary), they can start by lying less. >People who would be susceptible to political influence from sources like Wikileaks would likely also reject the credibility of the mainstream media, so the intended effect of influencing partisans Partisans don't decide elections and the stupidest part of this post-election hand wringing has been the complaints about the idiocies they believe and how they were influenced. What killed this election for Hillary was low turnout by non-partisans, not Trump. >assume they are biased, corrupt and bought by corporate and political interests. No need to assume. Plenty of evidence for this. >Yes ... and your releases wouldn't be believed I think if the DNC released their own emails they wouldn't have much trouble getting people to believe that they're real. If they released actual evidence about Russian hacking then likewise. >many people have been trained to assume that politicians are corrupt and that their denials regarding accusations of scandal are lies. Again, there's no real need to 'train' people for this because it's self evident and relatively more truthful and scandal free politicians (e.g. Sanders) do have a greater tendency to be believed. >I present to you the recent US Presidential election in rebuttal, and argue that selective exposure as a means of propaganda worked quite well in that case. I present to you Hillary Clinton: the most compromised, scandal ridden politician that the DNC could possibly run and the only person who, under the microscope of wikileaks, could actually end up making Trump look good. If Sanders was the nominee Wikileaks wouldn't have had anything of substance to leak.