What a sorry, shameful saga. I found this story linked to on rms' home page:
> Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to 12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators. (See how the media failed Julian Assange at Harper's Magazine.)
There's authoritarianism, where government knows what's best for everyone and keeps secrets to "protect" its citizens. Then there's democracy, where the government is open and honest so the people can make informed decisions on how best to run their government.
In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.
Is it really a mystery why people turned on assange?
In his later years his work became similar to that of breitbart, James okeef, and tucker Carlson. Regardless of what one thinks of those, There’s no question that their publications and intentions are extremely slanted.
No surprise most of the country dislikes him
There are some signs new Australian PM Albanese has been quietly working to secure the release of Assange, but he is now a broken man after a decade of effective imprisonment and the last few years of torture. The deterrent effect against any would-be whistleblowers has been achieved.
For all their claims to be intrepid truth seekers, the media today are simple weather vanes and mouth-peaces of regime power.
Framing this as they do continues to “fail” him! It wasn’t bad journalism that “failed” Assange, it was a concerted effort to assassinate his character and distract from his reporting.
Julian Assange has not been charged with exposing secrets or being inconvenient for the powers that be. He has been charged on the quite plausible accusation of helping Chelsea Manning illegally acquire these secrets. There are lines journalists (and you can debate if he is a journalist) are not supposed to cross, this is one of them.
Most of the negative consequences in his life stem from him running from this accusation, and from the rape charges in Sweden. He'd like to frame it in a different light, understandably...
> [Belmarsh] dubbed “Britain’s Guantánamo.”
Oh come the heck on, it’s a standard British Category A prison. Any comparison to Gitmo are prima facie ludicrous and makes the rest of the article suspect
The efforts to discredit Assange are a primary example of a successful smear campaign. It's not surprising that people are gullible to make such campaigns easy, character assassination always works when large government agencies are behind it for many years. I was actually surprised how long it took.
The media did not fail Assange, failure is unintentional. The media actively colluded with interested parties in order to smear him, because he created a problem for them.
Some of the independent journalists may have failed Assange, but the corporate mockingbird media intentionally maligned him, then later ignored him.
The era of alternative facts were kind of started with Julian Assange. The video "Collateral Murder" was heavily edited by Mr. Assange. It was damning enough without his edits, he didn't need to add his personal soundtrack and audio edits to the video. How Mr. Assange has become the poster boy of "leakers against the government" with his outrageous egotistical and dickish behavior is beyond me. Leakers should give "the facts" and "the truth" untarnished and free of modification.
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It's not who the media failed, but who the media protected.
It's the same page from the same playbook...repeat X enough times - regardless of accuracy - and perception becomes reality.
Nearly every major news organization practices this, shamelessly. It's a biz model based on eye-ball not journalism standards. It's a biz model that protects the few and the expense of properly informing the many.
The impact Assange and Wikileaks have had in exposing nefarious government secrets shouldn’t be forgotten. But, the damage that they’ve suffered to their reputation is entirely deserved. I don’t believe for a second that they didn’t know what they were doing when they partnered with Russia in 2016 to help draw as much attention as possible to the DNC emails—that is, engaging in an asymmetric political operation. That’s confirmed by the way they released the information—spaced out for maximum effect right up until the election. At that point, any claim they had on being simply a force for transparency was given up.
Cockburn's story is not the full story.
Assange is not charged only for doing journalism, such as revealing secret information. Assange is also charged for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and conspiring to do so.
Journalists rightfully defend Assange only in the the first type of charges, but not in the second type. He should go to US and face charges. Assange stopped being journalist at some point and started actively participating in crimes not covered by journalist ethics.
There is an important missing detail. The Swedes agreed to interview Assange about the rape allegations in London but the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) put pressure on the Swedes not to. The CPS deleted the emails they sent to the Swedes and we only know of their existence because of a FOI request on the Swedish side. Why were the supposedly politically independent CPS so keen to get Assange extradited to Sweden? FWIW, the CPS was led at the time by Keir Starmer, current leader of the opposition.