Ever since then regular media has been unwilling to work with him, because they’ve rightly judged him to be unreliable and have barely covered his personal issues from anymore than an arm’s length (the Guardian has been the most active in covering him from what I can tell, but US media has shunned him since then).
That is NOT what happened.
The misernable excuse for a journalist Luke Harding, who works for The Guardian, was given (in confidence) the password to an encrypted online dump of an unredacted version Assange's documents. He then published a book, in which he included this password. Harding was therefore blowing the identities of many vulnerable informants - not Assange.
Assange first tried to engage with the State Department to mitigate the damage that The Guardian's employee had caused. He then published the unredacted documents in full, so that those people that were identified could see that they had been exposed, and take suitable remdial action.
Harding is close to the UK security services.
This shifts the question to whether Assange is trustworthy or not, which isn’t the main one.
The main question is why Assange was able to get hold of those documents at all. The security is appalling.
The proof has been repeated by Snowden: Again, a single guy, limited resources, not even startup resources, just sole-trader resources, could access half of USA’s secrets at will and most of Americans’ personal information.
Think what enemy state agencies have access to, with resources and spies.
Let me help: wrongly so. That's the point and the disgrace.
> Ever since then regular media has been unwilling to work with him, because they’ve rightly judged him to be unreliable
I can think of so much worse adjectives for journalists who think this serves as an excuse to ignore something like this. If someone shows up drunk at the police station and says "hey you assholes, person X murdered someone, do your job already and don't just eat donuts" that may not be super polite, but it's not an excuse to not investigate.
That's not what happened.
The Guardian, through its own incompetence, made the full unredacted cables publicly available in February 2011, by publishing the decryption key. People online realized that the cables were available, and a German magazine published an article explaining that the cables were now available. Only after that happened did WikiLeaks put the unredacted cables on its website, under the rationale that since the cables were already public, they might as well be hosted on WikiLeaks.
The Guardian has consistently obfuscated this issue, and tried to blame Assange for the Guardian's decision to publish the decryption key. The Guardian's excuse is that they thought the decryption key was only temporary, whatever that's supposed to mean.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assan...
> The Guardian book let the cat out of the bag. Once it gave away Assange's password, the Old Bailey hearings have heard, there was no going back.
> Any security service in the world could now unlock the file containing the cables. And as they homed in on where the file was hidden at the end of the summer, Assange was forced into a desperate damage limitation operation. In September 2011 he published the unredacted cables so that anyone named in them would have advance warning and could go into hiding – before any hostile security services came looking for them.
> Yes, Assange published the cables unredacted but he did so – was forced to do so – by the unforgivable actions of Leigh and the Guardian.
Here's another Jonathan Cook article citing people intimately involved with the redaction process which contradicts your version of events:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-22/guardian-silen...
> ...Goetz [Der Spiegel], as well as Nicky Hager, an investigative journalist from New Zealand, and Professor John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count, all of whom worked with Wikileaks to redact names at different times, have testified that Assange was meticulous about the redaction process. Goetz admitted that he had been personally exasperated by the delays imposed by Assange to carry out redactions:
>> At that time, I remember being very, very irritated by the constant, unending reminders by Assange that we needed to be secure, that we needed to encrypt things, that we needed to use encrypted chats. … The amount of precautions around the safety of the material were enormous. I thought it was paranoid and crazy but it later became standard journalistic practice.
> Prof Sloboda noted that, as Goetz had implied in his testimony, the pressure to cut corners on redaction came not from Assange but from Wikileaks' "media partners", who were desperate to get on with publication. One of the most prominent of those partners, of course, was the Guardian. According to the account of proceedings at the Old Bailey by former UK ambassador Craig Murray:
>> Goetz [of Der Spiegel] recalled an email from David Leigh of The Guardian stating that publication of some stories was delayed because of the amount of time WikiLeaks were devoting to the redaction process to get rid of the "bad stuff."
> When confronted by US counsel with Leigh's [Guardian] claim in the book about the restaurant conversation, Hager observed witheringly: "I would not regard that [Leigh and Harding's book] as a reliable source." Under oath, he ascribed Leigh's account of the events of that time to "animosity".
But how many people have heard this version of events from the NYT, The Washington Post, the Guardian or all the other corporate media outlets that have been all to happy to pour scorn on Assange?
Thanks for correcting this. It's frustrating how many people get this, and many other so called facts in his case, wrong.
People have no hope of having an accurate picture of events unless they invest a significant amount of time into something that will not benefit them.
Journalists at major outlets are more concerned about the Assange case than their papers, but still have zero chance of getting accurate stories published about it.
There have been 20 articles in print and on the web mentioning Assange in the NY Times since 2021 began, avidly covering the details of his trial and extradition, but now nothing. If their search features are any indication, CNN doesn't believe you should seek out news as much as passively accept it-same pattern and then no recent mention.
Reuters' latest article from 25 June in a break from the style of their previous coverage leaves out mention of the trial details entirely in favor of a human element story petitioning Biden free Assange "to show the US has changed". This narrative does little to exculpate Assange or share why the trial may be over for good while preempting any credit for what follows to the mercy and wisdom of Biden. Whether Biden ignores or denies, well, them's the laws, you know.
1. Sure the Washington Post covered it, but it didn't cover it soon enough. 2. Sure the Washington Post covered it, but it's coverage wasn't favorable to Assange
As the ruling was appealed, Assange is still in prison over all of this. The now discredited evidence is still part of the case against him.
> ...as of Friday, July 2, there has been literally zero coverage of it in corporate media; not one word in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Fox News or NPR. A search online for either “Assange” or “Thordarson” will elicit zero relevant articles from establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo,” FAIR says.
The Post mainly sides with the US and only mentions the Sundin reporting in passing, diminishing its importance and omitting important parts, as the other replies here point out. A great example of power-friendly reporting when it comes to Assange.