“Democracy dies in darkness,” reads the Washington Post slogan—though apparently sometimes it’s good to put people in prison for exposing government wrongdoing (4/11/19).
After British police arrested Julian Assange on April 11, the first instinct of corporate journalists was to perform a line-drawing exercise. In so doing, corporate media dutifully laid the groundwork for the US Department of Justice’s escalating political persecution of the WikiLeaks founder, and set the stage for a renewed assault on a free and independent press by the Trump administration.
Following the philosopher of science Karl Popper, I’ll call this the problem of journalistic demarcation. Facing his own demarcation problem in 1953, Popper set out “to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.” This philosophical exercise had an overtly political purpose: Popper hoped to draw his line in such a way as to specifically exclude Marxism from the ranks of scientific theory. Stripping Marxism of its claim to scientific status would help undermine the legitimacy of a political movement that, at the time, posed a serious challenge to the ascendancy of Western capitalist powers following World War II.
The problem of journalistic demarcation is no less ideologically motivated and, through their effort to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks, corporate media have snugly aligned themselves with the contemporary brokers of US imperial power against a journalistic movement that, over the last decade, has presented them with their most significant challenge.
As Assange’s asylum was violated and he was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London at the behest of US authorities, the DoJ unsealed an indictment against him carrying one conspicuously minor charge. Despite their much-ballyhooed skepticism toward the Trump administration, corporate media instantly took the bait and drew their line.
To paraphrase the Nixon White House, Bloomberg (4/11/19) presented WikiLeaks‘ exposure of Iraq War crimes as nothing but a third-rate burglary.
Alan McLeod detailed for FAIR.org (4/18/19) that, because the Trump administration had “done well” by only charging Assange with conspiracy to “hack” a government computer, the prevailing corporate media response was to exclude him from the ranks of journalism. “If Assange Burgled Some Computers, He Stopped Being a Journalist,” read a paradigmatic headline at Bloomberg (4/11/19). This reaction intersected normal partisan boundaries, with a similar line collectively drawn by the Washington Post (4/11/19), National Review (4/12/19) and Fox News (4/12/19).
Individual journalists also took to social media to exile Assange from their profession. Katie Benner, a Justice Department reporter for the New York Times, tweeted (4/11/19) that true journalists “don’t help sources pick the locks on the safes that hold the information.” David Corn (Twitter, 4/11/19), the DC bureau chief for Mother Jones, similarly drew a line between himself and Assange: “As a journalist, I’ve been careful to distinguish between accepting info and inducing or helping leakers break laws to obtain information,” he declared.
When the US DoJ predictably superseded its initial indictment of Assange on May 23, charging him with 17 additional counts of espionage, corporate media’s demarcation problem just as predictably blew up in their faces. As Assistant Attorney General John Demers announced the new charges, he boldly traced the all-important line, guided by corporate media’s hand: “Julian Assange is no journalist,” he asserted.
Because the new indictment is significantly more severe and relates to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified material, not just with how that material was obtained, corporate media are now unsurprisingly questioning the line they were so eager to draw. The New York Times (5/23/19) no longer thinks the Trump administration is doing well by Assange. Bloomberg (5/23/19), the Washington Post (5/24/19) and Fox News (5/30/19) are also having second thoughts.
David Corn (Twitter, 5/25/19), for whom the line was so clear a month ago, now sees “a threat to journalists.” Katie Benner apparently deleted her previous demarcation tweet and has since contributed to a new article (New York Times, 5/23/19) about the “frightening charges” now facing Assange.
It is impossible to accept that corporate media were simply naïve to the inevitability of further charges against Assange. Moreover, we have known all along that, as C.W. Anderson said nearly ten years ago, “it’s very hard to draw a line that excludes WikiLeaks and includes the New York Times” (CFR, 12/23/10). So why the sudden change of heart?
Here Popper’s demarcation question about science becomes relevant, not only formally but also substantively, because WikiLeaks is a vehicle for what Assange calls “scientific journalism”—an approach that threatens corporate journalism.
Assange wrote in a 2010 op-ed that WikiLeaks aspires to “work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true.” “Scientific journalism,” he explained,
allows you to read a story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
This considerably ups the ante in terms of professional accountability for journalists. While corporate media are content with sourcing “people familiar with the documents,” for WikiLeaks obtaining and publishing those documents is not just a bonus or a lucky break, it is a requirement.
This documentation-based journalism precludes the blockbuster fabrications that make corporate media boatloads of money, from never-opened bridges in Venezuela to the entire #Russiagate debacle. Readers can’t click online to see whether the Guardian’s story (11/27/18) about a secret meeting between Paul Manafort and Assange is true, because it simply isn’t true.
So long as the persecution of Assange seemed only to do with his particular style of journalism, corporate media were happy to throw him under the bus. Now seeing that their own jobs could get caught up in the collateral damage (Consortium News, 6/5/19), all of a sudden corporate media are scrambling to erase their line.
Columnist Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 5/28/19) says Assange is clearly not a journalist because “Assange did not give the US government an opportunity to review the classified information” before he published it.
Meanwhile, much has been made, both by corporate media and the US officials pursuing him, of Assange’s supposedly inadequate harm-prevention effort in releasing unredacted classified documents. Marc Theissen of the Washington Post (5/28/19), for example, reproduced the US’s latest indictment at length to illustrate the “unfathomable damage” allegedly caused by WikiLeaks as it revealed actual crimes perpetrated by the US military.
Aside from the fact that there is no harm-prevention proviso in the First Amendment, and the further fact that the Pentagon previously could not demonstrate any harm stemming from the disclosures in question, it was actually the Guardian that released the password to the unredacted Cablegate archive (WikiLeaks, 9/1/11). Guardian editors disputed WikiLeaks’ characterization of this mistake, but not their paper’s role in it. Yet no one expects Alan Rusbridger to stand trial, or for the Washington Post to clamor to see him in the dock.
Corporate media jealously guard their self-anointed prerogative to set a limit on what the public may know. Ironically, while Popper sought to exclude Marxism from science because it was too occult, corporate media have sought to exclude WikiLeaks from journalism because it is not occult enough. In both cases, however, the division ultimately comes down to ideological rather than semantic lines.
In the wake of the Manning and Snowden leaks, Northeastern University professor Candice Delmas tried to nail down what it is about these events that provokes such uncritical reaction. Government whistleblowing of the sort WikiLeaks has enabled, she argued, amounts to a kind of “political vigilantism” that “involves violating the moral duty to respect the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power.” This coheres with Assange’s own assessment: “We deal with almost purely political material—I don’t mean party-political, I mean how power is delegated,” he said in 2011.
Corporate media have made it clear that, Trump or no Trump, they remain ideologically committed to the objectives of US imperialism. Whether inciting war with Iran (FAIR.org, 10/4/18), promoting regime change in Venezuela (FAIR.org, 4/30/19), whitewashing crimes against humanity in Yemen (FAIR.org, 4/9/19) or downplaying the last three decades of occupation in Iraq (FAIR.org, 4/16/19), it is evident that corporate media retain little interest in challenging US imperial power.
Still, one might have thought that, when drawing a line between Pulitzers and prison, corporate media would instinctively err on the side of caution and go to bat for Assange. Instead, their ideological and vocational attachments to US power, along with their professional jealousy and fear of WikiLeaks, rendered him a political target who was simply irresistible…at least until now.
Corporate media’s belated and self-interested reinvestment in the Assange case might have come too late, both legally and with regard to the humanitarian situation. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, recently reported that Assange’s prolonged isolation and crushing political persecution are now manifesting as “intense psychological trauma.” Even in a best-case legal scenario, he may never fully recover.
Legally speaking, despite their newfound concern, this isn’t the last we will hear of corporate media’s demarcation problem. Insofar as the First Amendment issue rides on whether Julian Assange is a journalist, US prosecutors will no doubt introduce the litany of unsympathetic line-drawing exercises provided by corporate media journalists as evidence that he does not qualify for protection. Sadly, this means that, should the Trump administration’s campaign succeed, Assange will indeed have been convicted by a jury of his peers.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.
Should we discount the possibility that this is all merely a pantomime of journalistic independence, to be followed by an even more compliant corpress’ kid glove approach to classified intel (other than that intended to further state interests)?
I draw a line around pantomime journalism, It does exist everywhere, These days it is hard to work out who is writing for cheap sensationalism, selling false outrage for attention, scare mongering. Exactly like our politions behave in Parliament. Anyone would be a fool to believe these statements claiming a fact has appeared only to hear opposing facts from all directions. Anyone can have an opinion but unless you are 100% certain you can’t sell it as fact. Seems anyone can say anything without accountability. Sure many countries are plagued with false information, properganda. Don’t think it is not happening here. Don’t think it is not happening in America. Don’t think it is not happening in England. Today, sadly I CAN’T tell the difference. Special laws protecting Presidents. the Clintons and their Clinton Foundation,what goes on there nobody knows. Just like nobody knows what goes on in countries where Empires rule, where communism rules. Kingdoms, Catholic Roman Church. One person I always believed always told the exact truth. Julian saw truth and published it.
Excellent article putting it all in perspective. Careful what you wish for.
Thanks John. Every time someone with public readership connects the dots explicitly, so much of the deliberate camouflage of corporate/state/agency controlled media gets vacuumed off the real moves revealed underneath. I hope you upset lots of people, because that’s usually a good measure of being some steps closer towards truth than they like.
Your article is ‘dated’….more news follows (they are coming after EVERYONE who speaks out – mind your back(up) and files.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-06/kerry-obrien-says-democracy-is-at-stake-after-afp-raids/11184764
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-05/abc-raided-by-australian-federal-police-afghan-files-stories/11181162
That raid is mentioned in the Consortium News piece the article links to, but I’m glad you call attention to it.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/05/after-assanges-espionage-act-indictment-police-move-against-more-journalists-for-publishing-classified-material/
Oh corporate media–how sad you are. Although, since “Remember the Maine,” corporate media has started wars, and filled the public with lies—-I mean the Gulf of Tonkin??? Really, where were the journalists?
Julian Assange is a journalist, no matter what those of you say and those of you who used his information when convenient—but now have created a magic bar of said to be TRUTH—which is as bad as the WMD lies.
And too corporate news people—-what exactly are you doing with all that information that you collect with your cookies? I never sign “accept, ” but I suppose you add me to your list of for sale information anyway. Where has the 4th Amendment gone? Journalists should be fearless and in search of TRUTH—otherwise, if you can’t —–then become writers of ads–because we all know that hype is the core of that. Be honest if you can——-but real journalism is a small group of honest investigators—and that group of writers is what all democratic republics need to survive! You have your role model for that, oh corporate ones —-and his name is Julian Assange!
I have no doubt that the earlier criticisms of Assange from the likes of the Times and Post don’t amount to much more than circling the wagons around the Bipartisan Imperial Consensus, but the most thoughtful analysis of why Assange should not be considered a journalist that I have seen or read came from On The Media’s Bob Garfield: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/assange-under-arrest (I recommend listening to the original audio since there are some typos in the transcript).
Assange himself seems at best confused about whether he considers himself a journalist or not; in a New Yorker profile of Assange, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote that, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events,” and that he considered published leaks a “tool of information warfare,” not anything resembling scientific journalism. It’s hard to imagine someone committed to scientific journalism telling Der Spiegel, as Assange did in 2010, “I enjoy crushing bastards.” He also, as Bob Garfield points out in the On The Media piece, seems to operate on a double standard whereby he postures as a transparency extremist for seemingly everyone on the one hand while insisting on absolute secrecy for Wikileaks’ own journalists on the other.
Also, I’ve been discomfited seeing that none of the think pieces warning of the dangerous precedents being set by Assange’s arrest seem to mention the many morally problematic projects he oversaw at Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ decision to abandon any redaction whatsoever earned it criticism from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and led to the release of personal information which is of no public value whatsoever, such as the personal phone numbers and email accounts of DNC staffers. Much more troublingly, they leaked a cache of documents exposing the names and home addresses or phone numbers for every female voter in 79 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, and accused a respected Turkish journalist of being an “Erdogan apologist” when she criticized them for it. Others who have tried to levy honest criticisms against Wikileaks’ methods or even to fact-check Wikileaks’ claims were trolled as Clinton stooges on Wikileaks’ Twitter page or simply blocked, a behavior that seems squarely inconsistent with someone committed to any journalistic principles I am aware of. Robert Mackey covered these events and many more in this excellent Intercept piece: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-beside-point/
Do any of these things mean he deserves to be put in prison? Maybe not, but they represent essential context in the debate over whether he should legitimately be considered a journalist or not, and I don’t understand why sources such as FAIR would consistently omit facts such as these from their reporting on Assange.
“His mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” I would say if you think this makes him not a journalist, that’s an odd definition of journalism.
I would say that if releasing the un-redacted credit card numbers and social security numbers of DNC staffers, publishing the names and home addresses of female voters in Turkey, and accusing anyone who has well-intentioned, reasonable criticisms or fact-checking of his work of being lackeys for Hillary Clinton or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan makes someone a journalist, that’s an odd definition of journalism. Considering FAIR is a group dedicated to media criticism and accuracy in reporting, I would think it would especially hit home that Assange petulantly refuses to acknowledge factual errors in Wikileaks’ publications even when they are pointed out by his supporters and allies. Many FAIR articles take WaPo and NYT writers to task for refusing to acknowledge factual inaccuracies in their own pieces; should Assange not be held to the same standard?
I love FAIR, read it literally every day. But I have to say it’s disappointing to see FAIR’s coverage of Assange completely paper over the moral and ethical complexities of his work at Wikileaks. Again, certainly none of this is to justify his indictments. But it deserves to be discussed.
Julian Assange is a publisher….others give him the info. So the thinking is not legitimate. Yes, he hacks to verify. He is most intellient. And the best “journalist” therefore.
An awful assessment. But what should anyone expect from FAIR when it refuses still to recognize the problem is not “Immigration” and instead, and for a very long time, state-sponsored “colonization”?
State-sponsored “invasion”! The “state”? The itself long-invading Mexican Government which, since 1981, has so artfully disguised, and disguises still, its literal “colonization of the USA” as “immigration to the USA” —both “illegal” AND so-called “legal”.
Our immigration laws need no reform. Our country needs not that on-going distraction.
What our country needs is to recognize things for what they are instead of what things are not. It needs to recognize and apply the only, even supreme, law necessary:
From the U.S. Constitution; insist it be applied:
Article IV
Section 4.
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”
PS. The USA, since, “1981” being invaded. ! With the US “Corporate Media” being the first to be invaded; and invaded still.
Does anyone doubt that the government is going full totalitarian when Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff called for Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest to CENSOR anyone who speaks unkindly of the Merck’s, Glaxo Smith Kline, Sanofi, Pfizer’s vaccine products? “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”–John Kennedy
Great article. The corporate media’s backflip is likely to be just face saving. Now Assange has been apprehended their job is mostly done and it is now important for them that the public maintain a erroneous perception of them as defenders of free speech rather than as the propagadarists they are. Fact is, all professional journalistic bodies and associations in the USA and elsewhere make no distinction between a journalist employed by an established media corporation and an ordinary citizen who publishes. ‘Professionalism’ does not relate to employment status or who one’s employer is. It simply requires an objective unbias view of the facts reported in the public interest. Even an unpaid citizen journalist can do that and the various associations of journalists in the US acknowledge that. Most managers owners & directors of nrws media corporations and many journists are not ‘trained’ journalists.