"A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public."
I am aware of the new trend that you can will things into and out of existence, but I do not subscribe to it.
There is a lot of people who would like to mark certain journalists as not journalists because they just don't like what they publish.
Freedom of speech requires that people are allowed speech and THEN and only then may be responsible for its contents.
Anyway, anybody who expects a journalist to be unbiased is utterly clueless. And anybody who expects a journalist to like a politician who hates him is being willfully idiotic. If any politician wished you dead, you would be rationally compelled to oppose that politician no matter how shitty their opponent was.
Selectively releasing information is what destroyed the goodwill he had with many.
Providing an opportunity for a dangerous legal precedent on top of being a royal asshole politically; I think that he has, very indirectly, taken on some Thomas Midgley-like qualities.
I do wonder however how things would look if he leaked the other way around, especially now that the american left has been morphed into the same warhawks from the bush era and pretty much rolled back the entire public perception grounds gained regarding government surveillance after the NSA leaks. This whole misinformation hysteria has just given them an excuse to implement patriot act v2 lite, and worst of all it's being exported and done with a heavier hand internationally in places where you don't have the first amendment.
He tried to sway a foreign election to help himself. Understandable, but it was irrespective of the policies - he is being given some onus for the outcomes of the administration he helped empower. He became a single-issue partisan - not going to a u.s. prison being the issue. After all he had done, it was sad to see. Stuck in the fricken embassy, he lost either perspective or integrity. Faulting him for creating an opportunity to criminalize whistleblowing is implying that he knew that that would be the outcome. Indignation won't save him, or the bob woodwards of the world either.
> do wonder however how things would look if he leaked the other way around
There is a continuity of government, so I think he would have been screwed. His only chance was hoping that the new administration would throw a wrench in the gears and the DOJ would be told to drop it by the AG.
> now that the american left has been morphed into the same warhawks from the bush era and pretty much rolled back the entire public perception grounds gained regarding government surveillance after the NSA leaks
There were gains? The public awareness was a gain at least.
> it's being exported and done with a heavier hand internationally in places where you don't have the first amendment.
These posts are all tangential to area 51, but what are you talking about?
In a free society, everybody is entitled to advocate for their own interests. Foreigners have every right to voice their opinion on American politics, particularly those foreigners who've been threatened with murder by American politicians. Would you get bent out of shape about Iraqi, Afghani, or Mexican journalists publicly advocating against another republican in the White House? You certainly shouldn't.
You obviously don't agree with Assange's priorities, but that doesn't mean he isn't a journalist. By that standard of journalism, only people who agree with you can be journalists. Obvious bullshit.
He wasn't lying, he wasn't scripting bots to impersonate Americans to astoturf a false consensus. He didn't do anything except publish information that embarrassed a politician who threatened to murder him. What he did was journalism, plain and simple. Journalists have no obligation to be politically neutral; journalists have been partisan from the very beginning. Benjamin Franklin founded partisan newspapers to push his political agenda before this country was even formed. Do you think he went out of his way to embarrass revolutionaries, just to be fair to the loyalists he opposed? Hell no.
> Would you get bent out of shape..
Of course I wouldn't. I'm not bent out of shape about assange advocating. He prioritized his life, as is normal. He isn't a hero. He prioritized his principles as well. I'm bent out of shape about the doj precedent. Arguing over the true definition of journalism is beyond our postings, but if you put things in a journal you might be a journalist. That doesn't keep him from being a fulcrum that society will pivot over. Why are you so angry and who is it directed towards? Or am I misreading the tenor here?
No it's not, because it's entirely made up based on "if he had all that stuff on H. Clinton, he must have had a bunch of stuff on Trump" i.e. it's nothing but an after-the-fact rationalization of an opinion already held, based on evidence unseen. Even if the innuendos weren't based on and backed by nothing but sneers and recycled 5 year old twitter memes, they're morally vacant: the requirement of fairness from journalists is a new, and entirely authoritarian requirement.
He's no more of an asshole politically than the monsters these people worship. Since when has being a mild libertarian been extremely radical, controversial, and dangerous? Since Democrats have been trained that they have a patriotic duty to hate designated enemies, refuse to look at facts that might help those enemies, and to encourage attacks on civil liberties that might harm those enemies. That duty to be blind to government control and aggression, the duty to accumulate personal wealth and credentials, and the duty to repeat pieties on request are the only political duties left for left-liberals.
He was, in my opinion very reckless with information with minimal benefit to the public and many of his actions don’t deserve constitutional protection.
I think if the material is news-worthy in its original form (like a recording of a public figure taking a bribe) you don't need to process it before publishing and certainly doing it is not a requirement.
And how is dumping documents different from publishing raw video and letting it speak for itself?
The dump contained information that placed individuals at risk; Assange made the information public as quickly as he could, so that affected individuals could take protective measures.
Luke Harding and The Guardian were responsible for exposing the data, not Assange. They betrayed him, and they still haven't admitted it. They were supposedly collaborating with him (also Spiegel and NYT).
I still don't know what happened at that time; MI5 came to the Guardian offices with Dremels and angle grinders to pulverize a laptop, in an obvious piece of theatre. Shortly after, the editor-in-chief (Alan Rusbridger) resigned and was replaced by a lightweight. The full truth will come out sooner or later.