The ABC wakes up after last week's police raid

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ABC raids a wake-up call to journalists who left Assange swinging

ABC,

12 June, 2019

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• The federal police raid on the ABC last week produced an unexpected benefit. Journalists are being forced to decide: whose side are they on. And where do they stand on fundamental issues of disclosure and the public's right to know?
  When the executive producer of Australia's most highly regarded current affairs program Four Corners retweeted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was "Putin's bitch" – a tweet she later removed – it said much about the state of journalism in Australia
  
  
  The re-post, echoing a view held by many Australian journalists, followed a Four Cornersinterview with Hillary Clinton in which she was given full rein to attack Assange. Clinton was angry that WikiLeaks had revealed through a series of leaked Democratic Party emails that the party executive had given her help to defeat her main rival Senator Bernie Sanders for the party's nomination – and helped the campaign of Donald Trump. While the former presidential candidate was challenged on emails relating to her controversial involvement with the Clinton Foundation, never once was it pointed out that the Democratic Party emails revealed how she had been an active beneficiary of deeply unethical behaviour inside the party
  What state have we reached where Assange, a journalist, facing his next extradition hearing in London on Friday, should be so reviled? It is dangerous territory for journalism. The insults thrown by Trump that journalists were the enemy of the American people might have been self-serving, but clearly the old notion that journalists mainly represent ordinary people against the powerful is in many cases something of the past. Just as the political parties have shifted to the right, so too have many journalists.
  
  
  
  What so enrages the journalists' "club" is the challenge from those who question their power, journalists like Assange. His revelations threatened them. But Assange, the outsider, did much more than that, he laid the path for the future of journalism, where journalists would be expected to produce primary source documents, wherever possible, and horror of all horrors, share them with the public.
  
  
  
  The internet made this possible, but for those who were holding out against the inevitable rise of this new form of communications, it posed a huge threat to the old order. Assange was not interested in off-the-record briefings from government insiders.
  He wanted to show the original documents to practise what he called Scientific Journalism. Its style of operation, where it worked with traditional media such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde in collaborative journalistic endeavours, spawned a host of similar operations, notably the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' most significant work, the Panama Papers. It is easy, and for some convenient, to forget how much in journalism was changed by the arrival of WikiLeaks.
  It's perhaps one reason that he is rejected by so many journalists. In what can only be described as an extraordinary event, one of Australia's most celebrated journalists, Peter Greste, who worked as a reporter for Al-Jazeera, turned on Assange.
  Greste who was charged with aiding a terrorist group by the Egyptian government, and was only freed from prison by a campaign run by journalists, attempted to strip Assange of his journalistic credentials, writing that he was not a journalist because he published some material that named US sources in Afghanistan. Whether you consider WikiLeaks' Afghan war reporting good or bad journalism, it is still journalism.
  After all, even the most appalling acts of phone hacking failed to deny the News of the World'sright to be described as a newspaper (although what kind of a newspaper was another matter) and the reporters involved in the hacking were never anything but journalists.
  
  
  
  So why does this matter? Those who deny Assange's journalism are denying him a major part of his defence. The First Amendment free speech provisions of the US Constitution provide protections for publishers and journalists who would otherwise be subject to prosecution under the US Espionage Act (1917).
  By arguing that Assange is not a journalist – though he is a fully paid-up member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance - journalists are giving ammunition to the US administration to prosecute Assange for espionage, a crime that carries a possible life sentence. And if the prosecutors can prove that Assange acted deliberately to damage US national security and aid a foreign power, the death sentence.
  Journalists should also understand that they could be next. All those journalists who believe this is far-fetched don't have to look any further than the federal police raid on the ABC's Sydney headquarters to understand it is not.
  The acting head of the AFP Neil Gaughan said the raid was necessary, in part, to ensure the "international community" knows that Australia takes the "leaking of sensitive information seriously”. The "international community" in this case means only one thing, the United States, Australia's most significant intelligence sharing ally.
  If Assange is left to swing in the breeze, it will be an open invitation for any journalist, anywhere in the world, to be extradited to the US if the administration deems that they have published material that threatens US national security.
  Andrew Fowler is a former Four Corners reporter who now writes books on journalism, national security and espionage. His latest book is Shooting the Messenger: Criminalizing Journalism.
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