Something really fascinating is going on with this documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Julian Assange has vehemently denounced it. His small cult fandom is outraged by it. Its creator, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, feels it is very fair, and indeed seems rather proud of his creation, claiming that the only people who criticize the film are those that haven’t actually seen it. The reaction to the film in the media has been extremely positive, indeed the film is clearly seen as not taking sides, and therefore destined to become the factual framework in which all the players and issues will be understood and judged.

So why did I leave the theater so uneasy about the content of this film?

Perhaps it’s because Gibney’s provocative interview clips of Assange are entirely re-edited and re-purposed footage from someone else’s earlier documentary project on WikiLeaks, footage shot in the context of a completely different filmmaker-subject relationship, one in which Assange may have felt comfortable to speak more loosely and say unguarded things, confident of the artistic intentions and scruples of the guy with the camera.

Perhaps it’s because so much of We Steal Secrets rests on the claims and opinions James Ball, who is portrayed in the documentary as a former WikiLeaks insider who became disgusted with Assange, but who in fact was just a teenage aspiring journalist who volunteered there for a few months. I find that even the most cursory research into this kid positively stinks: Wikileaks forced him out because he was stealing documents and meeting secretly with David Leigh, an anti-WikiLeaks columnist for The Guardian. Now, Ball himself works for The Guardian, publishing a variety of negative claims and allegations against WikiLeaks and Assange (all of which are strenuously denied by WikiLeaks as fabrications.) Where in the documentary is WikiLeaks side of the story regarding all this?

Perhaps it’s the strange way Gibney approached the Swedish sex allegation issue – not by presenting and examining the evidence and deducing a logical conclusion, but by merely playing various clips of hysterical and irrational-sounding “honeytrap” claims made by Assange supporters, and then contrasting this with an interview with one of the women, who talks about how her life has been destroyed by Assange’s actions. Powerful stuff, on the surface, but what exactly does she want Assange to do? According to this documentary, she wants him to personally return to Sweden to answer some questions about why his condom broke. Instead of presenting Assange’s side of this story, Gibney springboards off this condom issue to present the outrageous hypothesis that Assange might be a serial impregnator of women, fathering children by deceit or force, all over the globe, a “cry for help,” if you will, from a warped and rootless criminal. This hardly seems fair.

Perhaps its the way the granting of political asylum by Ecuador was handled: dismissed as a hypocritical joke, because the Correa administration has been “condemned” for suppressing free speech. Gibney of course does not make the slightest effort to examine the validity of this “condemnation,” and completely ignores the laborious, months-long process Ecuador went through reviewing evidence of political persecution (which Assange and his people had to provide, of course) before agreeing to shelter him. The documentary trivializes the actions of a dignified sovereign nation, almost like it’s not a real country, and implies its President Rafael Correa (who has a Ph.D. in Economics) is nothing more than a banana republic clown.

Perhaps it’s how the documentary opens with the claim that Assange was personally responsible for the WANK worm which attacked DOD computers in the late 1980’s. As far as I can tell, no one has ever accused Assange, or even suggested he was involved in any way. Gibney’s “evidence,” if you can believe it, is that the text of the WANK worm carried a quote from a Midnight Oil song, and Julian Assange apparently likes that band! By virtue of this claim, the documentary quietly but provocatively makes Assange’s teenage hacking seem much more iniquitous than it actually was, and associates WikiLeaks with cyber-terrorism and the potential to bring about nuclear catastrophe. Has any honest piece of journalism ever began which such an outrageous juxtaposition of barely relevant ideas?

Perhaps it’s the way Assange’s YouTube T.V. show The World Tomorrow is only mentioned as proof of megalomanic indulgence, when any viewing of the actual content of this show gives quite a different impression of his motives. I invite you to have a look for yourself at the interviews with Rafael Correa, Imran Kahn, or Moncef Marzouki, and decide for yourself whether Assange just wants attention, or whether he is, by the example of his show, making a valid and important point about the shortcomings of the modern media, and about how journalists should be plying their craft.

And perhaps it’s because the story of Bradley Manning is excessively and derogatorily focused on his homosexuality, his gender-identification issues, and his extreme emotional vulnerability, weirdly buttressed with bizarre and unflattering interview footage with Adrian Lamo, the autistic hacker who was Manning’s hand-selected confessor. From watching this documentary, one could not help but come away with the definite impression that leaks like “cablegate” come from mentally disturbed individuals who run in seedy crowds, and are therefore very dangerous, just like the government says. But should we really think this way? And is airing all this “dirt” on Manning really contributing anything valid or important to the issues at hand?

Julian Assange says that the biggest current threat to mankind is ignorance, and the biggest facilitator of ignorance in society is “bad media.” We Steal Secrets strikes me as a lovely example of bad media: a high-profile journalistic statement, with just enough truth to cover its ass (the financial attacks on WikiLeaks, Manning’s torture by the U.S. government,) and which slickly pretends to give a complete picture, but which actually presents issues in a dishonest and blatantly manipulative way, and encourages sloppy thought and shallow reasoning in the public mind. As a result of this, Julian Assange comes across as a dangerous, hypocritical lunatic, and WikiLeaks as a fatally flawed and dying institution that deserves to die – thanks to bad media, these ideas will now become part of the historical record.

And as is always the case with bad media, We Steal Secrets bets everything that Americans are too lazy and self-obsessed to undertake the boring and time-consuming investigative work required to find out whether this documentary is presenting an honest picture of the issues, or whether it is lying to them. Basically, it’s betting everything that we don’t care one way or the other, as long as we don’t have to think.

Shame on you, Alex Gibney! Shame on you!