The failure by journalists to mount a campaign to free Julian Assange, or expose the vicious smear campaign against him, is one more catastrophic and self-defeating blunder by the news media.
When Goliaths Infiltrate the Fourth Estate – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
in London
Original to ScheerPost
The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism.
The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous.
The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act.
They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.
The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador.
The C.I.A., through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case.
Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime.
He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication.
The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.
On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here.
“I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said.
“This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him.
Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.”
When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job.
But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.
“They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”
Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”
Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero.
“Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded.
The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022, calling on the U.S. government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.”
But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.
“It was pretty much an immediate shift,” Stella recalled.
“While the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn’t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.”
There followed a WikiLeaks-isation of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents. “Julian was a superstar,” Stella said. “He came from outside the ‘old boys’ network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video reveals that this is a war crime.”
April 5, 2010: Julian Assange addressing National Press Club about WikiLeaks Collateral Damage video from Baghdad showing U.S. air attacks that killed civilians on July 12, 2007. (Jennifer 8. Lee, Flickr)
Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.
He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, “for their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.”
“I find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that’s just cover for censorship,” Stella said.
“There are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It’s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Julian’s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you’re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you’re basing your news story on.”
“This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated. They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”
While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan.
Julian’s “message was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case here,” she said.
“It has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it’s authentic, official documents. It’s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured by the C.I.A. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.”
The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.
“It’s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what’s happening,” Matt said. “For them it’s a career. It’s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn’t do that.”
“For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”
“It’s a very insidious system,” Matt went on.
“Journalists can say to themselves ‘I can write what I like,’ but obviously they can’t. I think it’s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don’t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.”
“There has been something really sinister that has happened in the last 20 years, particularly at The Guardian,” he said. “The Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I’d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I’d always thought ‘Wow, we’re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.’ That’s now flipped. I’d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what’s happened is clever state repression.”
The Guardian building in London, 2012. (Bryantbob, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories.
[Related: UK Security Services Neutralized Country’s Leading Liberal Newspaper]
The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden.
The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013, filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee.
He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.
“The state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,” Matt said.
GCHQ’s “doughnut” building in Cheltenham, west England. (U.K. Ministry of Defence, Wikimedia Commons)
“The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war.
He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”
This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press.
“I wouldn’t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,” he said.
“This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued.
“This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.”
“If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…
The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.”
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Hear! Hear! “This is not just about Assange,” Matt Kennard (continued, above; and, Matt Kennard is on f/point!!!
“THIS IS ABOUT,” a U.S. Congress who is complicit in condoning, colluding, cooperating w/the execution of “Every evil the U.S. accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself.
It just does it under the pretense of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management.
It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness.” (..i.e., the muckity mucks snaggin’ Julian’s “toiletries,” razor, brush, soap, toothbrush, clean clothes, a suit; so when they, imo, kidnapped Julian, the Universe would see a disheveled, unkept, defiant Julian Assange; NOT the well groomed, articulate, intelligent professional publisher, invests journalist, of WikiLeaks. It’s f/MADness (Mutually Assured Destruction effected by the wild, wild f/West)!!!
“The U.S. government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.” Caitlin Johnstone. She ROCKS! No doubt about it, like those herein, above, She “GOT” her thumb on the pulse!!
SOLIDARITY, LIVES…. i.e., “WATCH: ASSANGE APPEAL — The US-UK Deception,” JULY 6, 2023, EMMY BUTLIN & CATHY VOGAN
“Happy birthday [July 3] to Julian and thank you. Thank you for WikiLeaks and thank you for your courage and thank you for your sacrifice. We will continue supporting you forever and ever. And whatever happens, whatever happens, I’d like to remain positive. But if the worst comes to the worse and Julian is extradited, we will continue our fight for justice.
For him, it’s extremely important that we cover all alternatives. This is not going to go away. This is the battle of our century. We live in an information age and this is the battle for the freedom of information at all levels. So thank you so much for inviting me today on his birthday to talk about the amazing Mr. WikiLeaks and the amazing knowledge that we have found.” EMMY BUTLIN
Imo, the take away, OPTIMISM + REALISM, “I remain hopeful and positive. We will win this. As Julian himself has predicted. It’s a wonderful battle to be engaged in, a battle for something so noble as knowledge. And it’s a battle that not a single drop of blood has fallen.”
“And we have to keep it that way because Julian has to be protected.” EMMY BUTLIN; and, MR. FISH’S illustrates the crime of our time, “The Goliaths have taken over the Main Stream Media aka Cable Network News Orgs & Newspapers.” Protest & Survive! “Facts do NOT cease to exist because they are ignored.” Julian Assange.
“Thank you very much Consortium News,” for keeping US in the loop. “Keep It Lit.”
“Give it up, for The London Gospel Choir perform outside Belmarsh Prison, “The higher you build your barriers, the taller I become. The farther you take my rights away; the faster I will run. You can deny me. You can decide to turn your
Face away. No matter ’cause there’s Something inside so strong. I know that I can make it.”
hxxps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGVauuSn4s&pp=ygUsTG9uZG9uIGdvc3BlbCBqdWxpYW4gYXNzYW5nZSBiZWxtYXJzaCBwcmlzb24%3D
Is it legitimate to call writers, who are speculative in their assessments of future events, journalists, or is it more appropriate to call them chroniclers; despite their being accurate and truthful in their reporting of details.
Julian Assange, when ‘freedom of the press’ was still the rule, was definitely not a speculative chronicler! (a person who writes accounts of important or historical events)
Chronicle
“In modern usage, the term usually refers to a type of journalist who writes chronicles as a form of journalism or non-professional historical documentation.”
Surely, contemporarily, the intent of journalism is the more immediate dissemination of ‘news’ rather than speculative chronicling from past details of what may or may not happen in the future – relative to the gathered details. The only present there is, is this moment!
All else is past or future. It is only possible to document the immediate past. There is no way of documenting the future. All each one of us can do is speculate, from the facts at hand, what the outcome will be. ‘Educated guessing’ is still speculative. What it is not is ‘news’!
This type of narration therefore, is, at best, unsettling; it only adds to the projection of confusion contained in rumor.
Recording of past events accurately is essential when it comes to imparting truth, yet all it is, is a summation in synopsis. Is this the intent of journalism?
‘News’ is openly reporting what is actually occurring in real time, as close to the ‘moment’ of its happening as is possible.
The technology of the internet has made this possible!
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.” — Jim Morrison
Journalism has become government bullshit, nothing more, nothing less. That’s just the way it is.
TO JULIAN (POLITICAL PRISONER)
John Lennon said, ‘Gimme Some Truth’. Julian responded. So Britain jails Julian and America wants to try him for revealing its crimes including the Mass Murder of civilians in Iraq. (The killers walk free like all US war criminals .)
Vile Bush and Blair are now celebs,
Despite repellent crimes.
And Truth is banned, so Wisdom ebbs
In these Orwellian times.
Assange reported what Yanks do—
Smash cultures every time.
Kill half a million children too—
But ‘Worth the Price,’ that crime!
The CIA and Britain too
Stalk Julian like snakes.
They throttle him as pythons do—
Spit venom till he breaks.
Newspeople, ask what you are for—
To cringe, obey, kowtow?
Or warn the world of nuclear war?
YOU MUST BE JULIAN NOW.
Great George and CaseyG. Wonderful, meaningful poetry. CN might want to create a “poets corner” as it were, or at least save the poems for posterity. (If we have one that is.)
The heritage media cut their own throats in the sense that they destroy the credibility that once allowed them to get the attention of an audience to sell that attention to advertisers–the business model of news in the 20th Century.
But at some point during the shift from one-to-many push media to two-way mostly pull media, the heritage companies (MSNBC, CNN, FOX, the NYT, WaPo, The Guardian, et alia) made deals with their repeated sources to reduce or release the expenses and responsibilities of investigative reporting. Instead, they publish what amount to releases from these sources. The sources are corporations and government institutions that have public relationship problems–the CIA, the Fed, various governments, Bayer, oil companies, media giants, and similar.
Instead of catching audience attention by providing news and commentary, they catch some audience by performing diatribe of oddly extreme opinions, attempts at humor, and the like. And they are propped up financially by the sources that they serve as mouthpieces and artificial objectivity and legitimacy.
I do not mean to suggest that this reflects the attitude of every journalist in such organizations. It is completely typical that workers in various parts of a corporation are told what they need to complete their duties to the satisfaction of their bosses, but not told the inner workings of the business.
I don’t think this is mysterious self-destruction, though it might be for some individual. As a large-scale social event, this is abandonment of the business of journalism as that existed in Western civilizations in the 20th century. At the same time, the persecution of journalism by corporations, government, and heritage media is both an attempt to throttle competition and to murder the new journalism before it can establish itself, to eliminate the possibility of a free press.
In a real and profound sense, they are slitting all of our throats. But theirs are not the first I shall miss. About four of five places where I get politically related information are now under some form of persecution.
Apparently the American press
seems to think LYING is best!
For Truth Tellers–you despise—-
Biden glories in his lies—-
Failing our own Constitution test!: (
I do not ever want to hear again British and American politicians and the mainstream media in the future sqeaking on about how awful it is when some unfortunate journalist is locked up in Russia or China or Iran or Syria or wherever, and going on about how they “must be freed” as “they are just journalists doing their job”, and expecting to be taken seriously. No way. FREE JULIAN ASSANGE.
True.
Matt Kennard is incorrect. The UK government is not trying to shut down investigative jounalism and imprison journalists. Last week the National Securiry Bill completed its passage through Parliament and received Royal assent to become law. Needless to say I have been unable to find a single UK media mention of the issue.yesterday
hxxps://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3154/stages
This leglislation allows a journalist and the editors of the publishing journal to be jailed for life if they published information that is ‘against the National Interest (defined by the government) and “may” be of use to a foreign government. Basically Kit Klarenberg could be jailed under this legislation. Matt Kennard will also have to be very careful not to publish the wrong thing and offend those in power.
Most people in the US anyway, have no idea who Julian Assange is. Just ask them. The lack of the most basic knowledge of current events (and even many past events) is shocking. How can we build mass resistance when most people don’t even know what they should be resisting?
I sincerely hope the emerging multipolar world will bring about some competition with the increasingly fascist West in the field of journalism. And in every other area of concern as well of course. The world has certainly had more than its fill of US/ Euro skullduggery.
The Twitter Files was a limited hangout, and a very successful one. It completely distracted the public from Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai’s lawsuit against Twitter which revealed the government backdoor portal that still exists to this day. Nothing has changed but the ways in which we are censored. The American public is the most propagandized population on the planet. They don’t even know what they don’t know.
Thank you, Valerie. “”some noise about Julian Assange” is all I can do these days, but I am responding to every request for donations from every politician and political organization (this includes you, Joe Biden) with a statement more or less like this:
“This election and this nation are about the First Amendment: I am not donating to any person or organization that has not come out loudly to demand the release of Julian Assange. I will not vote for any Democrat (or other candidate for any office) who has not made a public statement demanding that Assange be freed and pardoned and sent home. There is no point to electing people who support the death of the First Amendment,the torture of a journalist who exposes the anti-Americanism of our “protection” agencies and politicians. I will remove myself from the Democratic Party and vote for a third-party candidate who best supports the freeing of Julian Assange. Let me know if you have issued strong support for him and I will send a donation – not large but in the “many grains of sand” spirit. ”
If everyone reading this expressed the same anger at silent journalists and politicians, the noise might reach the White House.
Most welcome Carolyn. People are so afraid; we are inundated on a daily basis by the MSM with fear and loathing (in Las Vegas too.) And the complexity of ordinary everyday life goings on; especially anything to do with “officialdom”. Good luck with your endeavours.
If Julian is rendered over to the criminal torturers in the U.S., people must flood into the streets, block traffic, make noise, and generally make it impossible for “normal” life to go on as though nothing has happened! There should be a general strike all over the world. People, if you let this continue, we are all fucked. Totally.
The capitulation of corporate mass media to slo-mo torture & debilitation of Julian Assange for so long calls into question the very idea that they would fear the same tactics being used against them. They show little inclination to question seriously, let alone to quarrel with the powers that be.
Imagine if they had honored their public trust to challenge misuse of power, instead of capitulating & thereby enlisting themselves as junior partners in this grimy enterprise. They would have raised more public ire & recurring coverage would have given Julian more than a fighting chance, if not freed him.
Not that there won’t be repressive ass-biting to come. Sorry to say I just think it’s more likely to target independent journalists & outlets that refuse to dance to the neocon tune.
There’s some evidence of that already. Such as a Ukrainian secret service attempt to entreat the FBI to pressure a tech platform to shut down accounts of targeted individuals, including journalist Aaron Mate. And the Fibbies actually tried to comply!
What do you call it when the ones sworn to uphold the people’s rights are the very ones trying to tear them down? Feck that noise. And the petty, feckless corporate press that promotes it.
The press making no noise to save their profession reminds me of abused puppies who no longer bark. Same for people who think voting for the duopoly every four years is what “democracy” is all about and their only duty to improve things.
The “press” you speak of are actually presstitutes. They are paid by their owners to ignore the truth and lie through their teeth on a daily basis. They aren’t at all concerned about the future of journalism because they’re not part of that profession.
Thank you Chris Hedges. Few could say it better. However ominous Julian’s fate appears, we must fight creatively and persistently to free this honorable man until we succeed.
“… We have tons of journalists… w no dissemination power.
“Without a Free Press, there can be No Democracy”
Thomas Jefferson
There was this “meagre” attempt to garner support for “press freedom” a couple of months ago in the Guardian. It really is pathetic (and ominous as Mr. Hedges states) the lack of outrage and concern by journalists. Trevor Timm, the author of the article is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation:
“If you care about press freedom, make some noise about Julian Assange”
Trevor Timm
4th May 2023
The Guardian