And after listening to Frontline's piece on Bradley Manning and to the Guardian's investigative report on the imprisoned soldier, the only evidence I heard proffered about the alleged military whistleblower's "craziness" is that he once peed his pants, cried in a fetal position, and punched an officer. And, unless I missed something, those allegations notably came from unnamed military sources.

More egregiously, the Guardian's video in effect turns the military analyst's unapologetic gayness into a mental shortfall. "I mean I admired him for his courage on this,'' one friend says on tape, "but I thought it might be a little foolhardy."

Yet if Manning's story were framed within a different context -- say, his story was that of a bullied kid, or a prisoner of war, his peeing, crying and punching would just as likely be used to paint a sympathetic portrait.

I confess: I don't hear crazy in the symptoms, just fear, emotionality and anti-authoritarianism.

Ironically, it's Adrian Lamo -- the man who notified authorities of Manning's alleged data collection -- that comes off the most psychologically unstable in PBS' WikiSecrets as he speaks with the slurred words of someone perhaps dosed on psychotropic drugs. Lamo's own incarceration in a mental ward has been previously revealed.

Though Lamo's been vilified by the hacker community and free speech advocates, the Frontline piece also suggests that he was at least torn about turning Manning in. "There was no corrrect option; there was only the least incorrect one,"' he says. "Either way I would have been screwing someone over.''

It was Lamo that Manning contacted in May 2010 while working as an information analyst in Iraq.

"I can't believe what I'm confessing to you," he told Lamo, a notorious hacker, before revealing that he downloaded secret Iraq war documents.

"I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are,"' Manning wrote. "Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

Frontline's investigation reveals nothing new about the Bradley Manning case. It does, however, magnify the difference between hackers' radical transparency activism and the mainstream media's politic gatekeeping. And it records some of the most important editors in publishing -- New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Assistant Manging Editor Dean Baquet -- inadvertently making the case for WikiLeaks' and Manning's alleged leak of a quarter million diplomatic cables.

"I mean I don't want to give WikiLeaks credit for the transformation of the Arab world," Keller told Frontline, "but you know to the extent that Tunisia influenced Egypt, these cables played some role in the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. And these things are having an impact that I don't think any of us imagined at the time when it was just somebody handing us a huge trove of secret documents."

Baquet was even more pointed:

"If you boil it down, look at what happened as a result of Wikileaks," the NYT's editor said. "We gained a tremendous understanding of how government works, how wars are conducted. Balance the disclosures, and the impact, and the importance of the disclosures against everybody's fear of what was going to happen, it seems to me that it ended up okay. Right?"

Now under house arrest in England awaiting appeal of his extradition to Sweden to face charges for alleged sexual crimes, WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange tells Frontline that "history" is on his side.

"WikiLeaks is continuing to step up its publishing speed,"' he said. "We're still involved in getting the majority of these cables out. It does good. We can see the effects all around us."

That's the kind of crazy that I like.