But this is not the reaction Mr Assange received, that day or any other. Far from it: he is treated as a kind of rock star by a media slavishly hoping that he will feed them something. They fail to ask the most basic questions and the public follows suit. As a result our public debate on a range of issues is losing one of our most vital defence mechanisms against conmen and worse.

It's like the reaction to those people whom US forces in Afghanistan picked up and took to Guantánamo Bay. Because they had been in Guantánamo the press broadly felt they were victims and must therefore be innocent. Critical questions were almost never asked.

I remember being grilled rather more forcefully about one such character on the BBC's Today programme a couple of days after his release. I expressed a note of caution about the man's version of his story. "You sound rather cynical about his version of events," the BBC's finest said to me. "Well," I pointed out, as drily as I could, "he does claim he went to the world's heroin capital to recover from a drug habit." The point is that long before it got as low down as me on the media food chain a panoply of journalists and investigators should have been around to see that such a person, like Assange, was at the very least not taken entirely at his own estimation.

The media are good at doing this with the old establishment. But a new establishment is emerging which receives none of this attention. It has a following, an influence and a credibility that most of our politicians would give their eye-teeth for. Perhaps it has something to do with letting off anyone who can claim victimisation by America. But I can't help concluding that a critical gene is disappearing from our society — and that for all our technology and advancement, our vulnerability to villains and fraudsters is correspondingly greater than ever.