Comment & Debate
David Samuels. “The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange.” The Atlantic. December 3rd, 2010: “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. 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.’ Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press.”
Steven Greenhut. “WikiLeaks no threat to free society.” OC Register. December 5th, 2010: “If it weren’t for anonymous sources and leaked information, the journalism business would serve as a press-release service for officialdom. We’re all better off because courageous people leak important documents to the media. That’s true even when leakers have a personal agenda in releasing the information.”
Mr Assange told the Sydney Morning Herarld: “How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It’s disgraceful.”[1]