Julian Assange is free, but journalism is dead (for now)

Julian Assange: JournalistI had a conversation with a young friend, who’d admitted that he didn’t know who Julian Assange was. I wrote the following short bio for them.

Don’t feel bad that you don’t know who he is. He’d been incarcerated for over half of your life. Your media environment has been engineered to disappear him from the public eye. He’s not talked about in normal circles.

He is a journalist, the founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks grew famous for (A) publishing only true information that (B) shone an extremely harsh and unfavorable light on the practices of the U.S. empire and its vassals.

As you can perhaps imagine, Wikileaks and whistleblowers were thus pursued relentlessly. Assange ended up holing up in the Ecuardorian embassy in London for ten years. He was made an Ecuadoran citizen. A change of government to one more amenable to the U.S. revoked his citizenship. The UK broke all laws of diplomatic immunity and sent its police into the embassy to get him out. They stuffed him in Newgate prison and tortured him.

He’d been, until July 2024, a de-facto political prisoner of the U.S. for 14 years. They finally stopped trying to extradite him when he “confessed to journalism.”

The precedent is grim, though. The U.S. reserves the right to pursue any citizen in any country for saying unfavorable things about it. Journalism is, in a sense, dead.