That's nonsense.
1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes), human activities (that a murder happened, who the police claim to be interested in etc., business information (stock prices, sales, etc.)) all of which and more require no subterfuge, burglary, or other morally or legally questionable activities to learn about and create a report of.
2) Almost no espionage (as a percentage of the total amount created) is intended for eventual exposure via "the press", be that a real press, the internets, or various video outlets. I've been (tangentially) in the espionage industry (providing non-espionage (and non-interesting) support to people doing electronic intelligence gathering) and I have some feel for the amount of data gathered this way. I've also been (at a different time) in the Media Industry (providing similar non-interesting support to a much more interesting set of artists) and there really is NO similarity between the two, other than some journalists also providing some humint to military and civilian intelligence sources. (Note, I've never been on the humint side and know nothing of this that isn't already out there. It could be disinformation, it could be real.)
Very few journalists are aware and disciplined enough to be intelligence assets. Most who are are egotistical f'wits (like the aforementioned Assange) who just want more money and fame and don't care who they kill to get it.
What Assange did was neither espionage, nor journalism. He simply accepted material someone else had stolen (Manning was the one committing espionage with the Iraq documents.) and then published it (as far as I know) unedited.
The big fallacy being committed here is that Assange is not, or at least shouldn't be subject to US law, and as such is not covered by the Constitution. I believe our constitution to be the least-bad construction of a government yet implemented in a pluralistic society, and that in general our government is at least as transparent (given it's size and scope) as there is.
But we do not (yet) own the world and trying to try an Australian citizen for something that isn't clearly a crime in America (vis the pentagon papers case) and didn't actually happen in America (unless I missed something Assange isn't here in the states and didn't receive the materiel here) is really a fucking stretch folks.
A US citizen cannot be tried and convicted in an Australian court for the crime of owning a handgun IN THE US, even though it would be a crime in Australia (handwaving some legal details here, the point is jurisdiction). Now, if there is a statute in Australia that makes what Assange did illegal, then THEY need to try him, and I can tell you for certain that there ain't no constitutional protections there.
LOL, how did I miss this:
1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes).
Are you under the impression that a politician wouldn't consider his accepting bribes to be a secret?
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.)