Julian Assange is no journalist: don't confuse his arrest with...

Julian Assange is no journalist: don't confuse his arrest with press freedom.

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".

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, 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.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/assange-is-no-journalist-don-t-confuse-his-arrest-with-press-freedom-20190412-p51di1.html