You say this like the perception of him is entirely manufactured and divorced from any reality. Assange's image changed abruptly in 2016 because that is the year he went from politically agnostic public interest leaks to actively trying to influence an election and backing a candidate who considers the free press an "enemy of the people". It doesn't take a conspiratorial cabal to explain how Assange ruined his own image.

That some believe pre-2016 leaks were not political shows more about their bias than Wikileaks's motives. That motive matters now and didn't then shows similar bias.

Exactly what bias are you alluding to here? It certainly isn't the usual partisan hackery, as that would imply Democrats would hate pre-2016 wikileaks for damaging their president, and continue hating it post 2016 for helping the other guy. It would also imply Republican's would have liked wikileaks pre and post 2016. Instead what we see is a huge about face on both sides. I'm not being flippant here, I legit do not know what you are talking about.

Its really amazing that you would try to defend free press in a discussion about Assange. Locking up Assange is an attack on free press. Trump calling CNN liars actually isn't. Obama calling Fox liars wouldn't be either.

> There is no coordination between the 5 or 6 or however many media outlets

What evidence do you have for that claim?

Was mainly going by this book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

It's well known and has good research on how multiple media outlets can produce the same output basically.

Did you mean they do explicitly coordinate? I haven't seen or heard of that happening. Not that it's impossible.

The consensus is that Greenwald isn't a Russian agent. He's just stupid. His reporting has consistently had large and obvious errors at least since he was writing for Common Dreams.

How would you compare his reporting to the likes of CNN and FOX?

Shep Smith and the news anchors at CNN at least do a reasonable job of reporting the news correctly (which Greenwald can't), though none of those does strong investigative journalism.

Ok can you give me a couple of examples of these egregious errors by Greenwald you're talking about?

Seriously? The first time most people heard of Greenwald was his PRISM reporting, which was so wrong that when I thought about how many separate errors he had to combine to come up with that one article alone, I was in awe that he was able to sneak that by an editor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466438

This is a strong claim. Please provide evidence.

Strong claim? It's obvious to anybody who has read his work and is even a tiny bit familiar with the things he is reporting about.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/prism-prob...

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/803464221786677248?s...

Examples?