Sun Tzu said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." This is also true in rhetoric. The best way to get a belief accepted is to fool people into thinking that they have already accepted it.
(Note, first-year students, that I did not say, "The best way to convince people of a belief". Do not try to convince people! It will not work; and it may start them thinking.)
An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument. If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, "We all agree that killing humans is immoral. So when does human life begin?" People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes "human" at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor "on moving out of the house"), they won't notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.
Consider the recent furor over whether WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange is a journalist, or can be prosecuted for espionage. I don't know who initially asked this question. The earliest posing of the question that I can find that relates it to the First Amendment is this piece from Fox News on Dec. 8; but Marc Thiessen's column in the Washington Post of Aug. 3 has similar implications. Note that this question presupposes that First Amendment protection applies only to journalists! There is no legal precedent for this that I'm aware of; yet if people spend enough time debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist, they will have unknowingly convinced themselves that ordinary citizens have no First Amendment rights. (We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.)
First: I basically agree. The media and the commentators are spinning the coverage out of control. Your original post makes an excellent point about how rhetoric is used, and I don't disagree.
(For those of you who don't care about technical points of legal reasoning, there's no reason to go on further. That should be most of you. If you're hesitating, then just move on.)
Second: The Assange case (by this, I mean a putative American espionage-related case) has not yet started, let alone exhausted its hypothetical appeals. The questions at issue are whatever issues that may be raised by any of the trial lawyers, any appellate lawyers that there may be, any issues raised by "friends of the court" that any of the relevant courts choose to recognize, and any issues that any of the relevant courts choose to address on their own.
This could potentially include a lot of issues.
Many of those issues may seem really, really stoooopid at first glance. But the judiciary has the authority to make them effective. The judiciary does do this type of thing all the time. If you asked me, personally, I'd say the first amendment did not contain any such thing as a "reporters' privilege" when ratified. But my merely personal opinion doesn't matter. What matters is what lawyers can convince a judge of. That judge then issues a new opinion, "interpreting" the prior precedents. Next, other lawyers, and other judges "interpret" the law in light that opinion, and so on, ad infinitum.
This is the nature of the law that governs all of us who live in a common-law (English-based) system. I understand that analogous mechanisms apply under the Roman-based systems.