The media did not fail Assange, failure is unintentional. The media actively colluded with interested parties in order to smear him, because he created a problem for them.
Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
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Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#212There's authoritarianism, where government knows what's best for everyone and keeps secrets to "protect" its citizens. Then there's democracy, where the government is open and honest so the people can make informed decisions on how best to run their government. In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
Congratulations, you’ve managed to construct this into a classic “with us or against us” framework, a popular tool among authoritarians.
It's two diametrically opposed political ideals, with most people (and governments) falling somewhere in between the two extremes. That's the framework that already exists, not something I've constructed to divide people.
If you truly support democracy, then you accept that even the authoritarians should be given a voice, and you just pray they're not in the majority. That's very different than the "with us or against us" paradigm that's popular among authoritarians.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#213It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.
It was easy to do all that because he actively put his thumb on the scale for the Republicans. > “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
I wonder where his animosity towards Hillary Clinton came from, I guess we will never know.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist. Because the insistence of calling it a proxy war to make the war appear larger than it is comes from Kremlin's PR canon. They can't bring themselves to admit that they are losing to Ukraine and hence emphasise how they are "acktshually fighting against the whole NATO". Allies have given a lot of support, but mainly in…
> Because the insistence of calling it a proxy war to make the war appear larger than it is comes from Kremlin's PR canon. The point of calling it a proxy war by the Kremlin is not to make it seem larger than it, as the largest post-WW2 European war, is. It is to invert the responsibility for aggression. (Secondarily, it’s to deny Ukrainian agency and make its existence and sovereignty an irrelevancy in discussing a…
> The point of calling it a proxy war by the Kremlin is not to make it seem larger than it, as the largest post-WW2 European war, is. It is to invert the responsibility fot aggression. (Secondarily, it’s to deny Ukrainian agency and make the existence and sovereignty an irrelevancy in discussing a war where that is the entire issue.)
Yes, that's what I meant. The purpose of this talking point is to diminish Ukrainian achievements by leaving an impression that Russia is under attack and fighting the whole "collective West" (as they call it) and that the war is much larger in scope than it actually is: Russia vs Ukraine.
Foreign military aid to Ukraine has so far barely sustained defense and I wouldn't call aiding countries belligerents in this war.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#215It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.
WikiLeaks arguably helped people to do that quite effectively. They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger). III.B.3 of the Mueller report I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
That is part of the false narrative you and many were fed and believed. Assange repeatedly explained that documents you are referring to were leaked from someone inside and alluded without exposing that the source could have been Seth Rich who was shot in the street.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth. Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is…
The truth is a narrative. Not all narratives are true, but calling something a narrative doesn't in any way disprove it. Would you like to actually call out anything in Collateral Murder that you think wasn't exposing the truth? I'm old enough to remember Collateral Murder. I'm old enough to remember it's video footage. Of members of the US military murdering people, and laughing about it. You can't dismiss that as "…
Wikileaks never published anything untruthful TMK. That is a far better record than almost any other publishing outlet.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the revisionism? The collateral murder video was actually especially popular and impactful to the demographic (democrat young white liberal) that is now almost comically against Assange. Also, there's literally no difference in the way they did "narrative building" with Collateral Murder than , say, the NYT does in covering war crimes in Ukraine. I mean to be honest it's a bit hard to understand why you would…
I disagree with your characterisation, there was a lot of criticism of Collateral Murder from young white liberals! Assange and wikileaks, at the time, were presented as apolitical truth-seekers, not as journalists. Journalism is very different from what Wikileaks claimed to be, and Collateral Murder was not presented as a piece of journalism, it was presented as a leak. You cannot conceivably compare what Wikileaks…
To me, there is no real difference. Or at least not enough to warrant any criticism of wikileaks (w.r.t how they handled Collateral Murder, not in general of course).
Whatever they did was much more effective than american journalists were doing at the time. It was less so to push a narrative than to expose an event that would've been swept under the rug, just like many many other "oopsies" the americans ignored at the time.
As to liberals being pro-hillary, I don't disagree that it wasn't true in 2008. But those liberals almost certainly grew to avidly support her in 2016.
I guess I'm biaised since I have been exposed to the "other side" of the iraq war and the war on terror, as a practicing muslim in a pretty political family. But to me it still amounts to complaining or criticizing from a position of pure privilege (I'm referring to the criticism at the time of the video's publication, not your comments!), as Americans basically found it "yucky" to be exposed to the results of their own imperialist policies. In that context, I think WL would've been criticized no matter what because the actual issue wasn't that they were pushing a narrative, but more so that they were making some Americans uncomfortable.
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the thing, though, Assange and WikiLeaks are complicated figures who have done good and evil things. They are fair targets for criticism, and it's genuinely ok for someone to draw the conclusion that, "given the criticism, I cannot support them". Yes, a deliberate smear campaign exists, but also these are institutions with complex histories. You cannot simply call anyone critical of them "gullible".
> Here's the thing, though, Assange and WikiLeaks are complicated figures who have done good and evil things. Are they? What's the "evil" you're accusing them of? If you're going to accuse people of things, don't be vague.
I assume things like:
a) Alleged sexual assault of staffers (which again, alleged, but could be considered evil)
b) Leaking of personal information that is of no public interest, e.g. unredacted SSNs
c) Leaking private medical records of otherwise ordinary individuals, including e.g. medical records of teenagers who were raped
d) Leaking the names of people who are LGBTQ+ in dictatorial countries where that's illegal, putting their lives in danger
e) Timing the release of DNC hack is arguable, but I could see how someone might consider the timing of that release to be evil
f) There's some antisemitic stuff happening with Assange/Wikileaks. There's nothing like, glaringly out of line, but there's a whooole lot of stuff that's just over the line. (e.g. use of (((name))), calling his opponents "Jewish" media, employing holocaust denier and denying it, etc)
g) Assange himself is quoted as saying, "[We might] have blood on our hands" due to their editorial policy of publishing everything, unredacted, about potentially vulnerable people
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be missing context here, but you're referring to the fact that they leaked the Russian-state-hacked DNC emails, right? Could you elaborate on why you think it's "selective" to have leaked those? Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"
If you are smart, and Assange isn't an idiot, then you should not allow yourself to become a tool of a foreign government. Having an open pro-information stance is all well and good, but when it is obvious that the people sending you information are doing so according to their own timetable, you have to take a higher stance. This is where journalistic ethics come into play. You must ask your source, why today? If you…
The US was a foreign government to him. So why does it matter? Again, this is sort of weird blue-ultra-patriotism post 2016 is just extremely weird coming from the democratic voter base. It's almost as repulsive as GWB era "you're either with us or with the terrorists". A foreigner has absolutely no allegiance to the US government. In fact, he is much much more threatened by the American government. In huge part because he exposed a series of crimes and war crimes that were committed by said government. So why in the hell would you expect him to spare any kind of "courtoisie" to such a government?
Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
#220The impact Assange and Wikileaks have had in exposing nefarious government secrets shouldn’t be forgotten. But, the damage that they’ve suffered to their reputation is entirely deserved. I don’t believe for a second that they didn’t know what they were doing when they partnered with Russia in 2016 to help draw as much attention as possible to the DNC emails—that is, engaging in an asymmetric political operation. That…
Yeah, they have numerous exposed war crimes, cover ups and mass surveillance schemes. Which inherently meant that they took their info wherever they could get it from. But that's not enough to make up for harming the candidate you were backing in an election 7 years ago. They could've made sure to not embarass our side, that's the redline where they got too political!