There's always going to be a few who don't get it, and those are the ones who end up publishing. What I'd like to see is widespread understanding on the readers' part of sampling biases like this.

It won't happen to the journalists who are anti-Assange, because they aren't journalists, they are advertisers.

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising."

Maybe "activists" who have very strong ideological beliefs but unknowingly present their preach as fact-based reports in a very tricky way that looks very objective. The public are misled to believe their distorted conclusions.

I've seen a lot of them. On some topics especially when audience don't have access to the ground truth, they(zesty activists disguised as objective journalists) are majority. This lead to a big gap between the perceptions on the same topic among different groups of audience and each group consider the other one are brainwashed.

The difference between activists and advertisers is: the later are knowingly try to sell something while the former thought they are telling truth which make the hidden activists more deceptive.

Have you considered that some people might genuinely not like Assange for his actions in the past few years?

Disliking him personally is not a good reason to ignore this case or hope he is prosecuted. Assange is an asshole, but this attack on him enables future attacks on all journalists.

I'm not sure that journalists play too big a role. Journalists don't decide what gets printed or played on repeat on TV. Refusing to provide fodder to a propaganda machine (any major news organization) just creates a vacancy that can be easily filled, because it's capitalism and journalists too have kids, mortgages and college debt.

> Journalists don't decide what gets printed

That's exactly what journalists do - newspaper editors are senior journalists.

You're missing the point. There is no plural. There is only one editor in chief who makes final decisions and it's more of a management position. The higher up you are the more directly accountable you are for the bottom line. You don't get to that position by fighting for the truth. You get to that position by maintaining the tone that reliably brings in advertising revenue.