WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is one of the most hated men on the planet. He was arrested in London on Tuesday, his servers have come under attack from hackers, his PayPal financing has been hit, and even his bank has dropped him. He has been excoriated by the Obama administration.

But, to me, the most unexpected and unkindest cuts of all have come from what some might have viewed as his natural allies—journalists.

Recently, there’s been an onslaught of hostility, with Pulitzer-winner Steve Coll saying in the New Yorker that the WikiLeaks revelations are less important than the Pentagon Papers and calling WikiLeak’s Julian Assange a "self-aggrandizing control freak" who "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media.” Assange and his site have also come under attack from David Brooks of the New York Times and other journos, who have accused them of everything from anarchism to criminal conduct.

The attacks on Assange are becoming tiresome, and in my view they smack of professional jealousy. I’m pleased to report that there is resistance to the anti-Assange backlash. Wired magazine published a defense of WikiLeaks on its website on Monday, and the Atlantic has excoriated the “shameful attacks” on Assange.

“I think it’s outrageous how the journalism establishment is treating him,” Kyle Pope, editor of the New York Observer, told me. He points out that “every newspaper in America would kill to publish this kind of information. It’s the scoop of the century.”

Personally, I think that what we’re seeing is a form of professional resentment. Budgets have been cut back at traditional news-media outlets, especially print ones, for years, and the investigative reporting franchise has long been eroded by nontraditional competitors. Richard Behar, a former Fortune investigative reporter now probing the Bernie Madoff scandal for a forthcoming book, notes that “traditional investigative reporters are being bypassed in so many ways now.” Examples include “whistle-blowing groups, human-rights groups, and environmental groups” that “just post their reports there for everybody in the world to see.”

Indeed, it’s interesting to imagine what the journalism profession would have been like if there had been a WikiLeaks in the past. In 1971, for instance, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers. Would Ellsberg have posted the Papers—a secret record of the Defense Department’s history in Vietnam—on WikiLeaks instead? We can only guess.

To be sure, WikiLeaks hasn’t made investigative reporting obsolete by a long shot. Jesse Eisinger, an investigative reporter at ProPublica and former Wall Street editor at this website's late print companion, Portfolio magazine, pointed out to me in an email that WikiLeaks initially leaked scads of documents and no one noticed. So the site went to news organizations, which “vetted the material, judged it, organized it, prioritized it, edited it, and wrote about it.” Of course, Eisinger notes, "it appears initially like a threat to us: The Web is disintermediating investigative journalists as it has so many other professionals.” But he believes that WikiLeaks “actually shows the value of news organizations.”

It also competes with news organizations in a way that may turn out to be healthy. Assange told Forbes recently that he is turning his attention to the corporate world, so it’s interesting to speculate what would have happened if whistle-blowers in previous corporate scandals had a WikiLeaks to turn to. In his book No One Would Listen, Bernie Madoff whistle-blower Harry Markopolos describes how he tried repeatedly to bring his analysis of Madoff’s trades to the media.

But what if WikiLeaks had been around when Markopolos was trying to get the word out about Madoff. At the very least, there would have been more of an impetus for financial journalists to take Markopolos seriously and devote the resources needed to investigate his claims.

True, no WikiLeaks could have pieced together Watergate or exposed the financial crisis. But for investigative articles that originate from whistle-blowers, or people with access to documentation, it has the potential to be a serious competitor to traditional investigative reporters.

One problem with this scenario is that Assange’s motives are unclear. He told Der Spiegel, "I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing the bastards." That sounds to me a lot like H.L. Mencken’s famous comment that his purpose is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But he also made comments suggesting anti-U.S. animosity, and yesterday he said he’d release more secret dispatches if legal action is taken against him. If the cables are worthy of release, they should be released, not used as a threat.

It’s entirely possible that other Assanges may materialize in the future—entrepreneurs opening up their websites to leaked documents, and with more of a traditional journalistic motivation than Assange seems to have. The main barrier to entry would be making oneself known to all the leakers of this world. It took years for Assange to do that.

There’s not much my brethren in investigative journalism can do about any of this. We’re exposed to the same pressures and dangers that have always been. All we can do is watch as yet another new media chips away at the old.

But while this all plays out, let’s stop attacking Assange. The diplomatic cables have shed an unusually piercing light onto the intricacies of U.S. foreign policy. My old colleague Kyle Pope agrees. “Where’s everybody’s guts?” he asks. “We should be hailing this guy.”