Bronterre News

Or a tale of journalists as fake outsiders with bruised personas

NOT SO LONG ago, British media hostility towards Julian Assange was pretty much the norm. If there has for a while now been a marked softening of attitude, the long-lived peculiar, and largely unanalysed, animosity of the bulk of British publications and broadcasters towards the imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower is nevertheless not easily forgotten. It can, however, be easily explained.

  To begin at the end… The newly mellowed climate of opinion was neatly illustrated by The Guardian on Friday 10 December, the day the high court ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US, where he could face up to 175 years in prison. 

  “The decision”, the paper editorialised, “is not only a blow for his family and friends, who fear he would not survive imprisonment in the US. It is also a blow for all those who wish to protect the freedom of the press…

  “Regardless of Mr Assange’s wellbeing, the US should not be demanding his extradition, and the UK should not be granting it.

  “He is charged under the Espionage Act, including with publishing classified material. The case against the 49-year-old relates to hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, which were made public by WikiLeaks working with The Guardian and other media organisations. They revealed horrifying alleged abuses by the US and other governments which would not otherwise have come to light.”

  The paper goes on to quote Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International: “Virtually no-one responsible for alleged US war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such alleged crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail.”

  Supportive coverage came too from MailOnline, which on 12 December reported: “The fiancée of Julian Assange has accused UK authorities of playing the role of ‘executioner’ after the WikiLeaks founder suffered a stroke in Belmarsh prison. 

  “Stella Moris, 38, said the 50-year-old was left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage after the stroke in October.

  “Campaigners believe the incident was triggered by the stress of the ongoing High Court battle over whether or not he should be extradited to the US…”

  Such kindly coverage is in marked contrast to the undisguised antagonism of many journalists that emerged after Assange caused an international uproar when, in late 2010, WikiLeaks released about 750,000 documents and cables which appeared to point to alleged US war crimes and other misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange had fed the documents to The New York Times and The Guardian, who in turn published fact-checked and redacted versions of the documents.

  A further batch of documents received by WikiLeaks contained 400,000 pages of confidential information detailing seven years of US operations in Afghanistan, along with a cache containing highly sensitive American diplomatic cables. They amounted to what the American magazine Vanity Fair saw as “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. And it is this estimation which provides a vital clue about why The Guardian, at least, and Assange were soon afterwards to fall out big time.

  As The Guardian’s David Leigh told the magazine: “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.’ We were coming at it from opposite poles.”

  According to The Independent’s Ian Burrell, Assange had been given a letter by The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger promising not to use material from “batch three” of the documents (the diplomatic cables) without the consent of WikiLeaks. But The Guardian managed to obtain the “batch three” material through a separate source, after they were passed to a freelance journalist by a disgruntled former colleague of Assange’s.

   Regarding itself as free of its arrangement with Assange, The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times and the German news magazine Der Spiegel and prepared to publish without waiting for permission from Assange. When Assange discovered the plan, he threatened to sue. 

  Rusbridger managed to placate Assange, Burrell says, but on 18 December 2010 the relationship plummeted again as the paper ran a front page story claiming “Julian Assange furore deepens as new details emerge of sex crime allegations”. Assange was deeply hurt that the paper – where he had spent long hours in its building and shared meals with its staff – had turned on him. 

  Before long, the bulk of the rest of the British media progressively decided it didn’t like Assange and began sniping at him and showing gratuitous aggression. There had been of course the Swedish sex allegations – always vehemently denied by Assange – and his years of refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. 

  But a large part of what was making itself felt was journalistic professional resentment and frustration. Here was a new kid on the block who was putting everyone else to shame, churning out the makings of stories that were wall-to-wall world exclusives. 

  This just wasn’t right. A journalistic upstart was producing more scoops before breakfast than most seasoned hacks could hope to find in a lifetime in the trade.

  Mainstream news media types would never admit it, but they found this intolerable. They felt themselves outrageously upstaged – and humiliated. 

  In another way, they knew they had been rumbled; they were being forced to admit to themselves that their carefully cultivated personas as outsiders and dissidents was, at the worst, phoney and, at best, only superficially true. At a more fundamental level, they were in fact part of the Establishment. Unlike Assange, they would stop well short of putting their own liberty and security on the line in opposition to state authoritarianism. For some of those with their claws into the Australian, the horrible truth was that they were posers and courtiers.

  Further, Fleet Street and broadcasters saw their pre-eminence as news managers as being under threat. It was their privilege to decide what weight, if any, was accorded to any given story. That’s the way it had always been. But the sheer irresistibility of the WikiLeaks fare was taking this power out of their hands.

  Furious about being eclipsed, and very jealous, the frustration of the seasoned scribes turned into aggression. For some, though, other emotions emerged – feelings of failure, even of guilt. Here were very important stories they had failed to discover, deeply disturbing facts and incidents they had consequently failed to reveal. 

  From then on, Julian Assange would be their favourite reviled bête noir. Now, however, years later, with sensational WikiLeaks documents no longer in evidence, the British media feels it can afford to be nice about him, on the offensive, even, about his predicament, especially perhaps increasingly aware that they too, like Assange, could find themselves at risk of gagging, and retribution.

  And, their feathers no longer ruffled by the non-conformist in their midst, they may again be experiencing guilt, this time about their treatment of the man they demonised who, they may now fully realise, is sacrificing so much in the cause of press freedom.