AUGUST 16, 2019
With the indictment of
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the imprisonment of whistleblower Chelsea
Manning, we are seeing the US government’s blatant attack on the First
Amendment. This assault now is officially acknowledged by a US federal court,
where the judge dismissed a Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil
suit against WikiLeaks on the grounds of First Amendment protections that apply
to all journalists.
Assange, who has become a
political prisoner in this war on the free press, was charged under the Espionage Act over publications
exposing the US illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently serving a
50 week sentence in Belmarsh prison in London for a violation of bail
conditions he made in 2012 while attempting to obtain political asylum in
Ecuador to mitigate the risk of extradition to the US. While in a
maximum-security prison that holds some of the highest-risk prisoners in the
country, he continues to fight US extradition.
The UN Special Rapporteur on
torture, Nils Melzer, expressed his grave concerns for Assange, who is now
facing 175 years in prison if convicted by the US. He assessed that, if
extradited, he would “be exposed to a real risk of torture or other cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Renowned journalist John Pilger,
who visited Assange in prison last week, alarmed the public about his deteriorated health and
noted how Assange is isolated and treated “worse than a murderer”.
The prosecution of Assange, if
it were ever successful, would threaten the ability of journalists to receive
information and publish information that the government deemed classified all
around the world. Assange’s plight is tied to the future of press freedom. But
what is at stake is a much larger issue that concerns all of us. Why ought the
public engage in his fight against extradition? To answer this question, we
have to examine why WikiLeaks matters.
Justice through transparency
While corporate media tries to
perpetuate the US government’s official narrative that denies Assange is a
journalist, the fact remains that what he has done with WikiLeaks is
fundamentally no different than what media organizations routinely do.
Moreover, WikiLeaks has published material exposing the government’s secrecy
and corruption at a scale and speed that no other news outlets can ever match.
The organization, as well as Assange, won numerous journalistic awards. So,
aside from the excellence in journalism that WikiLeaks has demonstrated, what
made the whistleblowing site become a target of the US government’s massive
political retaliation?
The panel that granted
WikiLeaks the Walkley Award, the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer for
excellence in journalism, in 2011 captured the essence of its journalism. They
rewarded the organization noting the
group’s “courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of
journalism: justice through transparency”.
WikiLeaks has published more
than 10 million documents with a pristine record of accuracy and impeccable
source protection. With its motto of “the courage is contagious”, Assange
engaged in fearless journalism. The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was
rescued by WikiLeaks while he was stranded in Hong Kong after being charged
under the Espionage Act, acknowledged that “they run towards the risks everyone
else runs away from.”
This moral courage to overcome
fear comes from Assange’s commitment to justice. In releasing the Collateral
Murder video that depicted a US military strike killing innocent civilians
including two Reuters journalists in the suburb of Iraq, Assange indicated that
the purpose of the publication was to show the world what modern warfare
actually looks like and that his mission was “to expose injustice, not to provide
an even-handed record of events”. He made it clear that
the goal of WikiLeaks is justice and the organization aims to achieve it
through a method of transparency.
Taboo for modern journalism
This commitment to justice
that Assange demonstrated has been a taboo in modern journalism. A core maxim
of journalism purports to a fair and balanced reporting with a creed of
objectivity. Journalists are trained to see any subjective views in their work
as unprofessional; allowing personal conviction to enter the process would
cloud their ‘lens of objectivity’.
Yet journalists, like any
other people, are embedded within the cultural and social values they live in.
They cannot be immune from biases and perspectives colored by hidden agendas.
Just claiming objectivity does not allow one to magically eliminate one’s
subjective views and agendas. In fact, according to communications consultant
James Moore, a reporter’s complete objectivity can never be attained.
Moore dismantled the method of objectivity thus:
“Stories have always been
framed for purpose and overdramatized because reporters want to lead a newscast
or be above the fold on the front page . . . reporters cannot be objective
because they are a product of their experiences. They cannot ignore their
upbringing, socioeconomic status, circle of friends, personal self-interests,
and the viability of the employers they serve.”
Without honest acknowledgement
of the limitation of its method, the creed of objectivity has become a cloak
for reporters to hide their motivations and hidden economic interests. As
sociologist Gaye Tuchman pointed out, “‘objectivity’ may be seen as a strategic
ritual protecting newspapermen from the risks of their trade.” It has also been
used to regulate the profession, to keep journalists in line by condemning and
stripping off the credentials of those who challenge the status quo and speak
truth to power.
Moral courage
Through the corporate control
of the airwaves and the consolidation of media, the mechanism of free press has
been effectively dismantled. Big business grants journalists the monopoly of
power to define a narrative of history. With the profession’s creed of
objectivity, they actively facilitate injustice and oppression that the ruling
elites inflict on everyday people. In his article titled “The Creed of
Objectivity Killed the News,” Chris Hedges brought up the potential hazard of the stance of
objectivity:
“This creed transforms
reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It banishes empathy, passion and a
quest for justice. Reporters are permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak
in their own voices. They function as ‘professionals’ and see themselves as
dispassionate and disinterested social scientists.”
The profession’s adherence to
the pretense of objectivity has created passivity in the citizenry,
discouraging any critical thinking and voices of dissents. Democracy has become
an empty word, where people are relegated to being spectators. The absence of
ordinary people who participate in the vital decision-making of society has led
to a moral vacuum. Just as the Fourth Estate got infiltrated by commercial
interests, without the checks and balances of power, the legal system got
corrupted by politics, whereby judicial impartiality became unattainable. All
over the West, the rule of law is breaking down. It is in this systemic failure
of accountability, WikiLeaks brought moral courage and changed the media
landscape.
WikiLeaks is a source driven
journalism that is being true to the wishes of ordinary people within
institutions, who take enormous risks to inform the public about fraud, abuse,
waste and governments’ wrongdoing. WikiLeaks’ invention of scientific
journalism replaced the source of legitimacy, which used to be journalists’
supposed “objectivity”, with authenticated raw material. By releasing full
archives in a searchable format, allowing the public to draw their own conclusions,
WikiLeaks challenged journalists’ purported objectivity and found a way for the
conscience of ordinary people to directly inform the public.
Power of free speech
WikiLeaks, with its pursuit of
justice through transparency, brought truth that could restore the rule of law.
Through the act of moral courage, Assange enabled the true function of a free
press and unleashed the power of free speech. Mario Savio, spokesperson for the
Free Speech Movement in the ’60s, described freedom
of speech as something “that represents the very dignity of what a human being
is . . .”
In the aftermath of WikiLeaks’
release of a trove of documents, we have seen this human dignity in the actions
of ordinary people claiming their place in history. In a public address
delivered while he was detained under house arrest in 2011, Assange spoke of the impact of his work:
“This generation is burning
the mass media to the ground. We’re reclaiming our rights to world history. We
are ripping open secret archives from Washington to Cairo. We are reclaiming
our rights to share ourselves and our times with each other, to be the agents
and writers of our own history.”
From the election in Kenya and
the Icelandic revolution to the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, WikiLeaks’
publications sparked a global uprising. Courage brought by this fearless
journalism became contagious. Months after the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks
cables had bolstered a peaceful youth movement against the
political corruption of the media in Mexico. Revelations of Cablegate burst
into Latin America, having a fresh impact on corrupt politics, changing media
and public perspectives on major issues. It affected the course of a presidential election in
Peru, transformed the media in Brazil, and in two countries
led to the departure of US ambassadors.
Freeing prisoners of
conscience
With the First Amendment right
as a pillar of its democracy, the United States made its departure from the
British monarchy. Now, with the Trump administration’s outrageous extradition
case against Assange, the US government, who claims to be a champion of free speech,
is regressing society back to the tyranny of the Old World.
In a high security prison
where he spends most of his time in solitary, Assange now awaits his
extradition hearing, set to start in February next year. The legal battle of
this persecuted journalist is a matter of life or death. On US soil, where
Assange would have no chance of receiving a fair trial, the Attorney General,
William Barr, recently called to resume executions for federal crimes after a
16-year pause. The state of Virginia, where WikiLeaks grand jury sits,
still has a death penalty. Moreover, regardless of what
President Trump said about WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign, he
clearly stated that Assange should be given the death penalty.
The prosecution of Assange
matters to us all. It goes beyond the life of one individual. It concerns the
fundamental rights of ordinary people who, under America’s founding document,
are endowed with the power to determine the future of democracy. Julian Assange
is a journalist. WikiLeaks is a publisher. The journalism that Assange engaged
in demonstrated his fierce commitment to the free speech tradition that
recognizes the significance of ordinary people as authors of their own lives.
To honor this commitment,
Assange kept publishing. Even when senior US officials incited his murder and former US Vice President Joe
Biden called him a high-tech terrorist, he never waivered.
From financial blockades to the harassment and threats against anyone
associated with him, Assange fought to keep WikiLeaks alive. Despite enormous
pressure to stop publishing the documents concerning the Clinton campaign
during the 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks never withheld this true
information that belongs to the public. For this tenacity, he is condemned,
smeared, deprived of his liberty and placed in profound isolation.
The impulse for justice that
Assange brought to us, together with his sources’ courage, calls all to ignite
our moral indignation. It urges us, of our own volition, to bear the burden of
those truth-tellers who have sacrificed so much of their lives in order to
defend the public’s right to know. Only through each person choosing to act
with courage to claim and exercise the creative power inherent in free speech,
can we free those prisoners of conscience and achieve our shared goal of
justice.
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