Thread by @caitoz

News Media Who Ignore The Assange Trial Are Admitting They Don’t Care About Journalism

The #AssangeTrial prosecution has moved its argument from "Assange isn't a journalist" to "We're allowed to imprison journalists", yet most "journalists" remain silent.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

.@smh just published an article titled “Julian Assange interrupts extradition hearing again” about the WikiLeaks founder’s correct interjection that he never put anyone’s lives in danger with the publication of the Manning leaks a decade ago.
archive.is/O44x5

At no time does @latikambourke (who has been a regular smearer of Assange) bother to provide the reader with any of the public information showing that Assange never caused anyone harm and was not responsible for the unredacted documents being made public.
consortiumnews.com/2020/02/27/ass…

Bourke weaves a narrative about Assange being badly behaved in the courtroom, insinuates that the accusations he objected to could be true to the furthest extent possible without actually making a claim that would need to be retracted, and gets out.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1306384568832806912?s=20

And unfortunately this drivel is more or less typical of the coverage Assange’s historic, world-shaping extradition trial has been receiving from the mass media since it resumed this month.

This dereliction of journalistic responsibility was damning enough back when the prosecution was trying to argue that Assange was engaged in espionage and not journalistic behavior. Now that they're arguing they can extradite any journalist they want, it's far more pronounced.

.@CraigMurrayOrg writes the following in his latest update:

Murray’s subsequent breakdown of the prosecution’s arguments makes it clear that he was not over-selling this change in strategy.
craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/…

So that’s the precedent the prosecution is setting now. No longer “We can extradite and imprison Assange because he isn’t a journalist”, but “We can extradite and imprison Assange because we’re allowed to extradite and imprison journalists.”

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1306188681359880192?s=20

The argument that Assange isn’t a journalist has always been transparently false. Publishing important information so that the public can understand what’s going on in their world is exactly the thing that journalism is, and he's won many awards for it.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

But the fact that the prosecution is no longer even attempting to argue otherwise means they have ceased trying to pretend that they are not waging a war against journalism. Which means that all journalists have lost their last excuse for not condemning Assange’s persecution.

Now that it is out in the open that the US government plans to prosecute journalists for “disclosure of secrets which harm the national interest” (which in Assange’s case means exposing US war crimes), anyone who plans on doing real journalism is at risk.
shadowproof.com/2020/09/08/ass…

If someone isn’t using whatever platform they can to denounce Assange’s persecution, they are showing the world that they have no interest in ever doing real journalism which holds real power to account.

The prosecution’s new arguments should have drawn massive headlines from all the major news outlets who’ve been bloviating about the dangers posed by Trump’s war on the press with flamboyant preening and self-aggrandizement. Instead they are silent, because they do not care.

To quote Maya Angelou, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.