For Third Year, Committee to Protect Journalists Excludes Assange | Hacker News Reader

For Third Year, Committee to Protect Journalists Excludes Assange

thedissenter.org

86 points1cvmask26 comments

> In the organization’s press release on the 2021 index, it states, “No journalists were jailed in North America at the time of the census deadline.” That is only true if one redefines Assange as someone who is not a journalist.

I don’t understand that logic. AFAIK, Assange is in prison, but not (yet) in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange agrees: “Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019”

The complaint should be that he isn’t on their list for the UK.

The slightly less cynical view is that Wikileaks doesn't meet the bar for journalistic integrity and responsible disclosure.

Wikileaks takes far less care with vetting classified documents than for example Glenn Greenwald did with the documents Snowden provided.

Wasn't it actually the Guardian that published in a book the password to a circulating archive of secret information? It was the Diplomatic Cables if I'm not mistaken.

Talking about responsible disclosure.

Also the Reality Winner incident

> She was detained even before The Intercept published the article that was based upon the leaks.

It also is highly selective of the documents it publishes - his policy of “radical transparency” didn’t survive the TV deal he signed with Russian state media, and proof that he suppressed whistleblowers evidence of Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war was met with outright retaliatory threats against those who deigned to report on it.

This. I thought Wikileaks was an important endeavor and Julian Assange should be protected right up until he released "Collateral Murder." All he had to do was release the audio and video undoctored, it was damning enough in the raw. But the moment he decided to jazz it up with sound effects and music he lost all integrity. Ever since then Julian Assange's Wikileaks has only released "curated" information that he felt fits his narrative. The original Wikileaks was nothing like that, it was just that a wiki of leaks. I still think the original Wikileaks has a place in this world, but Julian Assange's Wikileaks is horseshit and I don't care if he gets arrested.

> Ever since then Julian Assange's Wikileaks has only released "curated" information that he felt fits his narrative.

Sounds to me like essentially every news organization ever.

> Sounds to me like essentially every news organization ever.

There is a thing called journalistic integrity, it does exist and is practiced. It is also something Assange completely lacks.

> There is a thing called journalistic integrity, it does exist and is practiced.

Trust in the media is at an all time low, mainly because many (not all) "journalists" threw integrity out the window in favor of activism.

protecting free speech really just means protecting free speech of people they agree with. No surprise here.

The point of things like constitution and Universal Charter of Human Rights is not to actually prevent anybody to infringe human rights; people with enough power can always do that.

Rather, like any other form of contract, it is supposed to act as a tripwire which gives ordinary people information that the infringing party might actually try to do something worse. It's a defense in depth.

The powerful are in power not because they are better, or stronger, but because they control the information we have about them. That's why transparency is so useful in rooting out the corruption.

Unfortunately, the counterplay to this "tripwire" from the powerful is to disable it by making people cynical (like the boy who cried wolf), that they get used to it and dismiss these violations as false alarms. Effectively, they are saying, "contracts do not matter", and wrongly justify it by correct observation that contracts always rely on weak link, which is the judiciary system.

So we should try not to be cynical, and rather use this information in the future. Maybe at some point, some of us come to a decision whether to support CPJ or Reporters without Borders; and then this tripwire will give us guidance to make the right call.

> ... not to actually prevent anybody to infringe human rights; people with enough power can always do that. Rather, like any other form of contract ...

That's a very insightful analysis, thank you.

I think another example of this is Google having a motto of "Don't be evil". Obviously a motto isn't enough to prevent evil, and it can't even define what "evil" actually means, but, like you say, it is a tripwire, or like a warrant canary, and a reminder to the public to always be vigilant against the threat that such a powerful entity represents.

(The point of this comment isn't to condemn Google, as I think it's probably the least evil of the MAMAA oligarchs, and people can decide for themselves whether Google's motto worked while it existed).

It makes perfect sense, they are the true journalists according to their own definition, so they don't just report facts, but they use "editorial process". /s

It's honestly stuff like this that gives a modicum of merit to the often repeated sentiment that NYT and WaPo are corrupt organizations that are just propaganda for the toads living under a volcano plotting out every passing moment (or whatever, IDK).

I remember a few years back, when NYT was really suffering a huge loss in readership, they had this mega panel to try and figure out why the paper was failing. At no point did their own editorial choices figure into the picture. (I think they decided the solution they needed was these sort of digital hybrid articles that have slick graphics, or something along these lines.)

In the big picture, I think these traditional news outlets do good, important work. However, they've really failed at times spectacularly in ways that have just given fodder to less reputable outlets, which people do listen to, and thus harmed even the notion of truth itself?

Examples would be how Iraq was covered, when the NYT had evidence similar to what Snowden leaked like 10 years later, but chose not to publish because the WH said they'd have a lot of death on their hands and stuff. Also, I think a lot of people feel that they pushed way too hard for a Clinton coronation, instead of really being objective and reporting on the phenomenon that was Bernie.

I don't bring up Bernie because I'm a Bernie Bro btw, I'm just saying that he was usually editorialized as a nuisance, perineal loser, who was a bad politician, when in the meanwhile his foil (trump) was seeing a similar populist rise that was met with similar befuddlement. The truth is, that Bernie and Trump were huge misses by media outlets and in many ways, these institutions couldn't see past their own certainty of how the world works.

So, when I read that no one is going to stand up for Assange, I just sort of shake my head and think that they really haven't learned a thing. They've missed opportunities to break huge stories, while at the same time have done very, very good reporting in the things that they excel at (I.e. Trump taxes, Panama papers, etc...) The problem is in an unfair fight, where one side isn't burdened by the truth, you can't even slip an inch. You have to follow the truth, wherever the story may take you, and a lot of these editors in my opinion have been failures for not taking this seriously.

It gives a semblance of credibility to the finger wagging from laughing stock alternative outlets, because sometimes (very rarely) they do have a point.

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