"Donald Trump, who praised WikiLeaks 141 times, now has 'no opinion' on Julian Assange"
By Julia Baird
Sept. 14, 2013
SYDNEY
WHEN asked to explain why he was running for a seat in the Australian Senate while holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Julian Assange quoted Plato: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Plato was “a bit of a fascist,” he said, but had a point.
Imagine the chagrin Mr. Assange must feel now, given that not only did he fail to win a place in the Senate in the recent election, but he was less successful than Ricky Muir from the Motoring Enthusiasts Party. Mr. Muir, who won just 0.5 percent of the vote, is most famous for having posted a video on YouTube of himself having a kangaroo feces fight with friends.
Mr. Assange, who was born and raised in Australia, has radically redefined publishing and provoked an unprecedented global debate about state secrets by subverting established practices and common wisdoms.
It seems odd, then, that his bid for political power, carried out in his absence by the WikiLeaks Party, was drowned by the greatest and most conventional of clichés: power corrupts. His campaign was saddled with the usual backbiting, arguing, dysfunction and even leaks.
In theory, it should have turned out better for him. Australians, who have long had a soft spot for irreverent iconoclasts and an abiding suspicion of authority, have always been more sympathetic to Mr. Assange than Americans have been. A 2013 .. http://lowyinstitute.org/publications/lowy-institute-poll-2013 .. poll found 58 percent of Australians agreed with the statement “the job WikiLeaks does is more of a good thing.” Only 29 percent thought it was “more of a bad thing.”
When Mr. Assange decided to run for the Senate, pollsters estimated he could get as much as 4 percent of the vote, with an outside chance of winning a seat, despite the fact that he would be campaigning in absentia.
The WikiLeaks Party candidates were highly skilled researchers, activists and academics. Their policies centered on protecting whistle-blowers, limiting surveillance agencies and ensuring greater transparency.
But during the campaign, after his party imploded with infighting, allegations of selling out and a host of resignations, Mr. Assange was exposed as a politician himself, with some of the same moral failings he has been skewering others for. A couple of weeks before the election, a storm erupted over preference deals, where parties that have already achieved the number of votes they need for a Senate seat can arrange to give spare votes to other parties, which usually pledge to give theirs in return. (Preferences are also passed on by parties whose votes are too low .. http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/senate_count.htm .. to get a seat.)
These deals are crucial paths to power for minor parties. In leaked e-mails, Mr. Assange stressed that preferences were “the single most important factor” in winning, adding: “Bar a raid on the embassy, we will not win without them.”
But WikiLeaks members alleged that Mr. Assange’s deputies had overridden the party’s governing body, the national council, to allow for preference deals that place right-wing anti-abortion or fringe parties — like the Shooters and Fishers Party — ahead of leftist parties like the Greens, which had supported WikiLeaks. The campaign manager, Greg Barns [now Assange's lawyer], attributed the deals to an “administrative error,” but WikiLeaks’s national council had agreed to put the Greens first, and some directors requested an immediate internal investigation. The conflict over those deals, and a delayed investigation, prompted a high-profile WikiLeaks candidate, Leslie Cannold, to resign. She said the party was not what it claimed to be: “a democratically run party that both believes in transparency and accountability.”
Ms. Cannold, an ethicist, has not spoken to Mr. Assange since. “This internal corruption revealed him to be no different,” she said, than the politicians he was claiming he’d be keeping accountable.
Mr. Assange’s actions were at odds with a democratic party structure. He had appointed himself president, for example, although there was no mention of this role in the WikiLeaks constitution.
When a reporter asked him why, he laughed: “I founded it. I mean seriously, this is so fantastic. Look at the name, this is the WikiLeaks Party. The prominent candidate is Julian Assange! Who founded it? I founded it. Are you serious?”
An unbowed Mr. Assange has vowed to fight the next election in three years. But to woo the 99 percent of the Australian population who spurned him, he’ll need to stop laughing at those who suggest that appointing yourself the unquestioned leader of a party, for an unlimited term, might make you a politician after all.
And not exactly a democratic one.
Julia Baird is an Australian journalist and the author of “Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians.”
Julian Assange is no journalist: don't confuse his arrest with press freedom
"Donald Trump, who praised WikiLeaks 141 times, now has 'no opinion' on Julian Assange"
By Peter Greste April 12, 2019 — 4.14pm
Standing before a media scrum in London, Julian Assange’s lawyer Jen Robinson declared that his arrest on Thursday "set a dangerous precedent for all media and journalists in Europe and around the world".
If his extradition were allowed, she said, any journalist could face charges for "publishing truthful information about the United States".
Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London.Credit:PA
As someone who has been imprisoned by a foreign government for publishing material that it didn't like, I have a certain sympathy with Assange. But my support stops there.
To be clear, Julian Assange is not a journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation. There is an argument to be had about the libertarian ideal of radical transparency that underpins its ethos, but that is a separate issue altogether from press freedom.
In the American extradition request .. https://www.theage.com.au/link/follow-20170101-p51dep , WikiLeaks is accused of conspiring with the whistleblower Chelsea Manning to publish a huge trove of military documents in 2010. The documents included the infamous "collateral murder" video filmed from the gunsights of two US Apache helicopters as they opened fire on a group of men in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, killing them all.
Other documents included the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, and "CableGate" – a trove of classified diplomatic cables that contained some embarrassingly undiplomatic analysis of world leaders and their countries. So far so newsworthy.
But Assange went further. Instead of sorting through the hundreds of thousands of files to seek out the most important or relevant and protect the innocent, he dumped them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or the impact they might have had. Some exposed the names of Afghans who had been giving information on the Taliban to US forces.
Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility.
To effectively fulfil the role of journalism in a democracy, there is an obligation to seek out what is genuinely in the public interest and a responsibility to remove anything that may compromise the privacy of individuals not directly involved in a story or that might put them at risk.
Journalism also requires detailed context and analysis to explain why the information is important, and what it all means.
When The Guardian and The New York Times got hold of the cache of files that Edward Snowden downloaded from the US National Security Agency in 2013, they spent months searching through it to pick out the documents that exposed the extent of the NSA’s surveillance operations. Then, the newspapers took months more to release those stories in a cascade that was as explosive as it was impressive.
In 2015, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got hold of more than 11 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. But the ICIJ did not simply publish and be damned. Instead, it compiled a team of journalists from 107 news organisations across 80 countries, who then spent more than a year going through that vast trove. They carefully dug out evidence that confirmed corruption, tax evasion and the evasion of international sanctions by some of the world’s most powerful business and political elites.
VIDEO -Justin Assange to face court in Britain 3:29 Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested and dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
It was long, hard and expensive work, but it was also journalism at its finest, fulfilling its watchdog role by fearlessly holding the powerful to account and doing its best to protect the privacy of those who were doing nothing wrong.
Julian Assange did none of that, so he cannot claim to be a journalist or hide behind arguments in support of press freedom. The distinction matters because of the way the digital revolution has confused the definitions of what journalism is and its role in a democracy.
We at the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom are committed to restoring public trust in journalism, which can only ever happen if its practitioners work with responsibility and respect. It has never been about opening up a hosepipe of information regardless of the consequences.
Peter Greste is a founding director and spokesman for the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom, and UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland.
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