NEW YORK, U.S. — The news media continues to face challenging times around the world. Whether it is the killing or state-sponsored arraignment of journalists or the closure of defiant media organizations, press freedom is under tremendous stress from propaganda and media driven by political agenda.
Julian Assange has become the embodiment of such attacks on press freedom and liberties. He has been facing the onslaught of the powers-to-be for exposing the misdoings of certain government officials.
-Press Freedoms on Decline
The 20th World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories, has revealed “a two-fold increase in polarization amplified by information chaos – that is, media polarization fueling divisions within countries, as well as polarization between countries at the international level.”
UNESCO’s ‘World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development: 2021/2022 Online Report’, says that “press freedoms worldwide have declined measurably since 2012” with news services being “blocked online, journalists illegally spied upon, and media sites hacked”.
“Media capture – when news media are ostensibly free but lack real independence – continues to be a growing threat,” the report adds.
Trust in the media is also at an all-time low. The Digital News Report, published annually by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says trust in the news has fallen in almost half of the countries surveyed and risen in just seven. Interest in the news has fallen sharply across markets, from 63 percent in 2017 to 51 percent in 2022.
In the United States, the situation is even dire. In Gallup’s most-recent annual rating of the honesty and ethics of various professions, the ethics rating of TV reporters has fallen nine points since 2017 to 14 percent in 2022.
In 1979, 51 percent of the people polled had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspaper journalism. In the latest Gallup poll, that number has dropped to 16 percent. Confidence in TV news has dropped from 46 percent in 1991 to 11 percent.
Can the situation get any worse? Passionate defenders of the free media certainly believe so, especially if the United States manages to get Wikileaks founder Julian Assange extradited from the UK.
The UK government has already approved his extradition, but Assange has appealed the decision. If he lands in the US, he will be tried on 18 federal counts and, if convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison for each of the 17 felony counts against him.
UNESCO’s ‘World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development: 2021/2022 Online Report’ says “press freedoms worldwide have declined measurably since 2012” with news services being “blocked online, journalists illegally spied upon, and media sites hacked”.
-Assange’s crime?
“Assange committed empire’s greatest sin,” Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hedges – former Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief of The New York Times – wrote in an article on ScheerPost.com.
“He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes.”
For his impertinence, the US Department of Justice has charged Assange with, among other things, “conspiracy to receive national-defense information, obtaining national-defense information, and disclosure of national-defense information”.
Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has dismissed those trumped-up charges.
“The Assange case is the story of a man persecuted and mistreated for revealing the sordid secrets of the powerful, in particular, war crimes, torture and corruption,” he wrote in a commentary for the August issue of Le Monde Diplomatique.
“It’s a story of deliberately arbitrary judicial decisions made by Western democracies eager to claim exemplary human rights records. It’s a story of deliberate collusion by intelligence services without the knowledge of national parliaments and the public. And it’s a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting by the mainstream media to deliberately isolate, demonize and destroy an individual.”
But why? Because the Australian, helped by leaks from Chelsea Manning, dared to reveal the atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by US soldiers. He released what is now infamously called the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which shows US helicopter gunmen laughing as they shot dead people on the ground in Iraq, including two journalists of an international news agency.
“It is a damning indictment that nearly 20 years on, virtually no one responsible for alleged US war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail,” said Agnes Callamard, the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, in a statement last year.
The CIA plan to murder Julian Assange and the fight to free him | @DoubleDownNews #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/8LTjMwyRQX
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 28, 2022
-In the crosshairs
It could have been a lot worse than a potential “lifetime in jail”. As Hedges wrote in his ScheerPost article, “Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds”. The US seriously considered those options.
According to an investigation by Yahoo, senior officials inside the CIA and the Donald Trump administration discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. They even discussed kidnapping him, and these discussions to kidnap and kill occurred “at the highest levels”.
“There seemed to be no boundaries,” a former senior counterintelligence official was quoted as saying by Yahoo.
It could have been a lot worse than a potential “lifetime in jail”. As Hedges wrote in his ScheerPost article, “Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds”. The US seriously considered those options.
According to an investigation by Yahoo, senior officials inside the CIA and the Donald Trump administration discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. They even discussed kidnapping him, and these discussions to kidnap and kill occurred “at the highest levels”.
“There seemed to be no boundaries,” a former senior counterintelligence official was quoted as saying by Yahoo.
-Double standards
Imagine if China or Russia, or one of the Middle East states, had entertained similar thoughts. There would be an outpouring of self-righteous indignation and outrage in the Western media. But when it comes to Assange, there are few voices of protest in the mainstream media in the US or UK. This has been pointed out quite passionately by Peter Oborne, the former chief political writer for the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
In a recent commentary for Press Gazette, Oborne wrote: “Let’s imagine a foreign dissident was being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison charged with supposed espionage offenses by the Chinese authorities. And that his real offense was revealing crimes committed by the Chinese Communist Party – including publishing video footage of atrocities carried out by Chinese troops.
“… and that the Chinese were putting pressure on the UK authorities to extradite this individual where he could face up to 175 years in prison.
The outrage from the British press would be deafening. There would be calls for protests outside the prison, solemn leaders in the broadsheet newspapers, debates on primetime news programs, alongside a rush of questions in parliament.”
“For Assange, there has been scarcely a word in the mainstream British media in his defense”.
This silence, of course, has not gone unnoticed in nations regularly targeted by Western media for their poor treatment of the media and human rights records.
-Look Within
In an opinion piece for the pro-government Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah, MelihAltinok wrote: “The United States and the United Kingdom are constantly criticizing the press and freedom of expression in other countries. They publish reports and give official support to civic organizations that prepare press freedom assessments in their countries. They seem very assertive about the whole thing and they are radical in their approach.
“However, the freedoms of press and expression in their own countries are not unlimited as they recommend to other countries. The most dramatic indicator of this is the yearslong ‘hunt’ for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”
But does anyone in the West really care for such criticism? Ostensibly, not.
“This affront to accountability, press freedom, and freedom of speech is on stage for the entire world to see, yet I wonder who is paying attention,” Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA case officer who served two and a half years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act, asked in a recent commentary for the CommonDreams website.
True. Who is paying attention? Not even celebrated and glorified Western institutions outside of the UK and US, like the Nobel Foundation, for example.
Writing in the Manila Times in December, Kalinga Seneviratne – author of Myth of Free Media and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era – wondered why Assange did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, while Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov were honored with the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”.
“If this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is about promoting ‘press freedom’, the Norwegian Nobel Committee missed a golden opportunity to make a powerful statement at a time when such freedom is under threat in the very countries that have traditionally claimed a patent on it,” he wrote.
“The question that needs to be asked of the Nobel Committee is why Ressa’s and Muratov’s activities are seen as far more important to achieving world peace than the courageous battle of Assange to expose far more serious crimes that have a far greater impact on world peace,” Seneviratne asked.
Fair question, but one that the Nobel Foundation will forever avoid. Still, there are much bigger causes at stake in the fight to free Assange.
As Codepink’s Justina Poskeviciute puts it, “If our ‘liberal democracies’ manage to silence a loud and known voice of fearless journalism, what chance will other voices have?”
And that – as the honorable Bard would say – is the disconcerting question.