How the Press Abandoned One of Their Own
How Julian Assange has been left to his fate.
My piece in Harper’s Magazine, just published, on the real facts of the Assange story, studiously ignored by his fellow journalists.
Julian Assange, 2015 © Andy Gotts/Camera Press/Redux
Alternative Facts
How the media failed Julian Assange
Every year on the first of December, the Committee to Protect Journalists publishes its global prison census, documenting the number of journalists behind bars around the world. The 2022 edition set a grim record: 363 jailed journalists. Scanning the list—organized alphabetically by first name—and scrolling down to the J’s, we see that Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, publisher of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, has been locked up since 2021 on charges of money laundering, part of the Ortega dictatorship’s crackdown on independent media. Next is Juret Haji, the director of the Xinjiang Daily, detained since 2018 after a colleague was accused of being “two-faced,” a common Chinese government accusation. Julian Assange would fit neatly between these two names, but he fails to appear, as has been the case since the founder of WikiLeaks was dragged from London’s Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019 and locked in solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison, dubbed “Britain’s Guantánamo.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/alternative-facts-how-the-media-failed-julian-assange/
Julian embarrassed the powerful, both in government and in the mainstream media. And so he's paying the price for being a real journalist who's willing to inform the powerless about the powerful and their various crimes and atrocities.
Of course, those in the government and in the mainstream media are often one and the same. Just as a revolving door exists between the military and its merchants of death, so too does a revolving door exist between government and its media liars and spinners. Caitlin Johnstone cited Jen Psaki at MSNBC as the latest example of this: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/22/free-speech-is-for-fighting-the-empire-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/
The persecution of Julian is all about intimidating other journalists. He's being crucified to deter others from following in his path. And overall it may even be working, which is obviously not good.
Thanks for everything that you do, Andrew.
Because the CIA and the security state control mass media along with social media and all journalists and editors are actually careerists and not journalists.
No need to go to Harper's now.
You're welcome.