There are many names for what Assange has done with Wikileaks, but "real journalism" is not one of them.

Why not? Like any journalist, he confirms and publishes stories given to him by sources while protecting their anonymity.

Journalist? The sort of information he publishes, his timing and the people he chooses to defend make him nothing more than a political activist.

It's not difficult to see why: he has broken laws and is now stuck in a cage and the only way to get out of it is to cosy up to the politician who is most likely to pardon him.

How do such tactics differ from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC? Are those operations not journalists? Assange is in a cage because, after being cleared of any wrongdoing vis-a-vis the sexual assault complaints, a "special prosecutor" decided she had to speak to him in person, i.e. get him in a venue subject to U.S. extradition.

Everything you just said is completely irrelevant to Assange's credibility as a journalist. Just because he's a martyr doesn't mean he's a good, ethical, or honest person.

So you're okay me posting all your personal information, every byte of it, in a public forum? Are you also okay with me telling 100k of my followers that "I wouldn't be surprised if someone shot Tycho"? Or that I ask them more directly to harm you?

It's just "journalism" you know.

Are these the things that Assange has done? Regardless, wikileaks is one of the most powerful forces in bringing to light information that the public should know. The fact that the founder is holed up in a foreign embassy because of a nakedly corrupt government prosecution while no “achktual serious journalist” defends him says it all.

From what I heard last, Wikileaks had a leak of their Twitter PMs, supposedly, and some of them were quite on the far right spectrum of "that's not nice". WL has neither denied nor otherwise objected to these claims and leaks to my knowledge and there wasn't any evidence they were falsified as far as I was able to tell. IIRC the founder also promised to hand himself over if Chelsea Manning was pardoned, which happened at some point and yet he remained hold up in there.

I think WL at some point was "the most powerful force bringing to light information the public should know" but it's no longer the case. They just dump data into the internet with no sense of moderation or actual journalism.

Dumping a lot of data isn't journalism. Everyone can do that. Journalism is processing and summarizing the data, pointing out the parts that are troubling.

In the digital age, much of “journalism” is just an unnecessary obfuscation layer easily abused by powerful actors. Dumping the source documents provided by whistleblowers is preferable to withholding them from public gaze and printing a story.

Source documents can just as easily be abused.

You're the one quoting “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."

i think you’ve interpreted it a bit too literally

It's a stupid quote and you know it.

It's obviously not meant to be interpreted as a definition of journalism.

It's meant to say that if you're just printing what someone powerful wants you to say, that's not journalism.

You sound like a preacher ‘explaining’ bible verses.

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Perhaps Assange started out good and recently turned bad or perhaps he was playing a game all along, but he's lost nearly all of his credibility in the last 2 years. At one point I'd trust WikiLeaks over most media out there. Now I pretty much can put more faith in Fox News than Julian Assange. Strange times we live in.

WikiLeaks just publishes documents. Where does faith come into it? Faith is for the NYT congregation.

As in, faith that someone/something is not bullshitting the public to achieve their own goals.

I mean it’s pretty hard to bullshit the public if your only method is to release authentic documents.

Yes, but in the past 2-3 years, Assange and WikiLeaks have been doing far, far more than that. For one, just look at their Twitter and leaked Twitter DMs: https://twitter.com/wikileaks

Also, releasing authentic documents, even if they were the sole thing they ever did, can be itself a form of bullshit, even if the documents are 100% real and not doctored, edited, or manipulated in any way. "Bullshit" is distinct from "lying" or "faked evidence". Selectively releasing documents that only push a certain narrative, while not releasing documents and/or intentionally not attempting to acquire documents associated with other narratives, is a form of manipulation, not a form of journalism.

I don't know to what extent Assange practiced these kind of intelligence tradecraft games before the 2016 election, but during and after it, WikiLeaks effectively transformed itself into a private intelligence agency, presumably with Julian Assange at the helm.

Maybe it was because of Assange's personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton (his vendetta being pretty justifiable, considering Clinton's frequent attempts to have him extradited, arrested, and imprisoned, and her alleged but unproven references to having him assassinated as cited by what has been claimed to be anonymous State Department sources; this still doesn't excuse Assange's loss of impartiality, though). Maybe it was because Assange saw this as a way of making the US geopolitically weaker and shuffling the superpower deck a bit, due to his issues with the US government. Maybe it was because he wanted to see the world burn. Maybe he was being blackmailed, threatened, or otherwise coerced by non-US countries' governments. Maybe he became a witting agent of a non-US government (though I kind of doubt that). Maybe a mixture. But either way, he lost all pretenses of neutrality and credibility after his actions during the 2016 election were revealed.

I don't take issue with WikiLeaks releasing the DNC and Clinton campaign emails - they should've released them - but I do take issue with their underlying campaign, strategy, goals, and motives, as made very evident by their PR efforts, public statements, and leaked private conversations.

Organizations like WikiLeaks are a good thing in concept, and WikiLeaks' original stated goals and disclosures do seem to have generally been good and moral, but either something changed, or Assange was playing a long con from the start.

It just doesn’t really matter what Wikileaks say on their Twitter account, the important thing is the documents they host on their site. They’re not a newspaper. They only ask that people examine the documents they publish. Their own impartiality and credibility is simply not an important issue. Maybe if there were known cases of Wikileaks intentionally taking parts of documents out of context to make things look damning, that would be a concern, but i’m not aware of anything like that. They are a conduit for whistle-blowing - if they are holding back documents that don’t suit an agenda then presumably the whistleblower would leak to some other outlet, so I don’t see a big concern there either.

> In 2003 they helped launch an illegal and murderous invasion of Iraq

Yes, they participated in negative campaigns like this one (not all of them though[0]), but they also did a lot of good things. There is a huge difference between a well-researched article about Roundup in a major newspaper and a tweet on the same topic, even by someone with many followers.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/13/iraq.guardianl...

A British source? I distinctly recall American sources like the New York times & NPR acting as court stenographers during the period. I can still hear Bob Edwards' voice talking about the pending Iraq War as though it were the most sensible thing in the world and there being absolutely no criticism of its justifications.