Glenn Greenwald on Walkley Awards: Nothing compares to WikiLeaks

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald said Monday it was "justifiable and very well deserved" for WikiLeaks to receive a Walkley Award in Australia for the whistleblowing website's outstanding contribution to journalism.

WikiLeaks was lauded at the annual Walkley Awards, where winners are chosen by an independent panel of journalists and photographers, for its courageous reporting of secret U.S. cables.

"It is without question true that Wikileaks is responsible for producing more journalistic scoops over the last 18 months than every single media outlet in the world combined," Glennwald said on Democracy Now. "You can barely read a story about any import region in the world without making reference to what was revealed by those diplomatic cables."

The whistleblowing website has published thousands of cables in which U.S. diplomats give their often candid views on world leaders, to Washington's acute embarrassment.

"The significance of the diplomatic cables and other WikiLeaks releases is astronomical," Glennwald added. "There’s nothing that compares to it in the last couple of years in terms of shedding light on how the powerful factions of the world function."

Watch video, courtesy of Democracy Now, below:

With AFP.