- Written by: Dr Binoy Kampmark
- 9 Replies
The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession. Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise. For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.
The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.
Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line. One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.
Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy. “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018. Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?” For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day. “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew. Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”
These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets. In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith. Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.
The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power. When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate. WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.
Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it. Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.
The tendency is pestilential. While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.” An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”
While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”
There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks. There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.
Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face. “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell. He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”
In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher. By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained. Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award. Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners. In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.
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9 comments
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Terence Mills It seems strange that Newscorp and SKY would question whether Assange is a journalist when they deliver to us people like Peta Credlin, Paul Murray, Sharri Markson and a host of others who pose as journalists but who cannot meet the fundamental criteria of journalism, to demonstrate impartiality and objectivity.
By the way, I saw the leader’s debate……………………..Democrats you have time to find another candidate !!
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Clakka Some journalists, particularly in Oz, UK and USA were piss-weak in not backing-in Assange, and now it’s coming back to bite them hard.
Thank goodness for the Albanese govt’s strong but quiet diplomatic representations. It enabled Assange’s legal team (before ignored by the US DOJ) to negotiate the final plea deal with the DOJ.
At the District Court hearing in Saipan, it was recorded that no individuals were harmed by the publication of Mannings’ trove, and that Assange was acting as a journalist. Also, it seems that such a plea deal cannot act as a precedence under US law, as there can only be a precedence when a matter has gone to trial. And numerous US legal commentators have stated that it has blown wide open the disjuncture between the US Constitutional First Amendment (Freedom of expression) and the US Espionage Act 1917, saying they must be made congruent.
All that said and done, in Oz, yesterday the disgraceful ABC News promulgated illogical and puerile dross from LNP’s Birmingham, and went on in a disgraceful, obviously LNP scripted, interview by Speers with Kevin Rudd. Kevin Rudd annihilated the simplistic deviousness of Speers and the ABC News
The sooner we get the lazy cowardly NewsCorpes and SevenWest & Sky flunkies out of Oz media and the minds of the Oz folks, the better.
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Phil Pryor It’s a bit rude and deserving of a huge serve back, as if I care, for Merde Dog’s Poxed Menagerie of maggoty Misfits is just repulsive, inadequate, unprofessional, uncivilised, unaware, uncouth and a bunch, apparently voluntary, of slu*ts and slimes. Mentioned above, Credlin, Markson, Murray, Bolt, etc, remain clear examples of human manifestations of a pot of festering turds in a bedpan, not journalists.
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Canguro Essays like this are to be savoured, and it is to the AIMN’s credit that they provide a platform for Binoy Kampmark to express his views. Assange, in common with all outliers, was bound to put many conventional noses out of joint, mainstream media of all stripes in particular, given the inherent tendency of MSM to swim in the shallow end of the pool where the risk of drowning is least, and where the waves are unlikely to wash one off the rocks.
Rather than rushing in to join the rabid pack that at the scent of blood mindlessly joins the pile-on, a pause, a step back, perhaps allows the admittance of a more sensitive appreciation of what Julian Assange’s mission actually meant.
It’s an unfortunate fact that journalism, as a profession, has become degraded, vulgarised, prostituted, cheapened, sold to the lowest bidder, and outliers like Assange are increasingly rare. I support the move to erect a statue in his honour, wherever it may be erected.
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New England co*cky Sadly I agree with Binoy. Too many so-called journalists spend too much time re-writing the press release propaganda from foreign owned multinational corporations rather than doing investigative journalism.
Then, as Devil’s Advocate, that is the requirement for workers in the Murdoch Media Monopoly where the truth goes to die.
Perhaps the worst example of such writing is the output from sports scribblers expressing their frustrations as wannabe but cannaebe ”heroes of the sports fields” about the possibility of NSW winning the NRL Origin game or series.
The days of the ageing Anglo-Celtic dinosaurs playing on teenage reputation have thankfully passed only because Queensland selected talented Aboriginal players who whipped the Whiteys at every meeting. Anthony Mundine was correct and both Nathan Blacklock and Preston Campbell were ”victims”.
However, the underlying racist attitudes continue in the NRL administration and clubs with recruiting Pacifika nations before looking at Aboriginal players. Now where is the funding for country rugby league juniors??
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Clarke True Canguro, Assange acted as a whistleblower of US war crimes, how is that a crime?
When I first heard of his release I thought the Brits don’t want him to die in prison. But then he appears in reasonable good health, but then again, some poisons are slow acting, so who knows.
A subsequent thought was this is the Western power elites pretending to be human, at last after 12 years, but really, they are cooked to the point of being worse than useless, most goodness gone.
As for the quality of journalism these days, I watched Tucker Carlson giving a talk in Canberra, “How Do They Get People This Stupid In The Media?” – “I got here and the country is so unbelievably beautiful, and the people are so cheerful and funny and cool and smart. I’m like, your media has got to be better than ours. It can’t just be a bunch of castrated robots reading questions from the boss, and then it turns out it’s exactly the same. Maybe even a tiny bit dumber.”
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David Baird Geez, Phil. Don’t hold back so much. Tell us how you really feel. I do think the descriptors and appellations you use to assess the collective pile of excrement are very much deserved.
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Ross Questions maybe someone else can answer.
Julian Assange is an Australian citizen.
Julian Assange has no allegiance to America or its laws.
Julian Assange broke no Australian law that I know of.
When does American law supersede that of all other countries?
Why did Julian Assange languish in an English prison for years when he broke no British law?
Why did it take long sustained and severe persistence from an Australian Labor Government to achieve a result?
Did Albo threaten the septics (rhyming slang, septic tanks, yanks) with “release our citizen or pack up your Pine Gap spy station and f*ck off”, if not why not? -
John C Most of the spineless lily livers who think of themselves as journalists are nothing more than arse lickers who will say whatever their editor or boardroom wants put across as “fact”. I am feed up with main stream media treating the general public like dumb sheep. If this was America then maybe there would be some truth in that statement. As we all are witnessing, in the Land of the Freaks journalism has plunged to the lowest levels ever seen. Lies seem to be the norm, though often disguised as fact it is (Sorry to quote a felon) “fake news”. Sensationalism and grabbing headlines is all that seems to matter to the majority. Journalists are like politicians, a necessary evil that has gone down the wrong path and lost it’s way somewhere in the last few decades. To the many good journalists out there who do a real job of reporting truths, don’t ever stop rooting out what our governments regularly hide from us, the very people that put them in positions and pay their over inflated salaries out of our taxes, which they don’t deserve.
