It’s possible that Julian Assange is a rapist, or at least a guy with a dubious history of respecting his sexual partners’ wishes. That would not make Wikileaks as an organization any less worthwhile, or less significant. And the outrage so loudly trumpeted by some of the worst of the Media Villagers — people like Marc Thiessen and David Brooks — only makes it more likely that Wikileaks is doing an important job, and that Assange deserves some credit. Last week, when Assange’s arrest was still “immanent”, David Samuels at the Atlantic online published a piece on “The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange” which deserves wider dissemination:
… Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional – terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.
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The true importance of Wikileaks — and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder — lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange’s efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country’s political leadership.
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Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America’s wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year…
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It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest – and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.
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The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together – a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. “We’re the step before the first person (investigates),” he explained, when accepting Amnesty International’s award for exposing police killings in Kenya. “Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest.”
The issue, of course, is that among the DC media aristocrats, “the traditional practice of reporting” has been reduced to “dutiful stenography of this news cycle’s talking points”. And the battle between those media professionals who consider themselves courtiers and those who prefer the role of gadfly hasn’t changed much since the original Gilded Age, when Finley Peter Dunne said that it was the job of reporters “to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.”