When it come to heroes, Assange is not our guy
Julian Assange is not a journalist and he is not a freedom fighter, writes Claire Harvey. He should not be connected to the Australian journalists fighting against our government’s media intimidation.
Fans of the free press, please say it after me: Julian Assange is not a journalist.
He’s not a freedom fighter. He’s not a champion of your right to speak your mind.
If the US wishes to extradite him, and they claim to have evidence that he helped a soldier — Chelsea Manning — hack into Defence Department systems — then I say go for it.
Julian Assange, at every point in the past decade, has sought to undermine and diminish the central tenet of good journalism: fairness.
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He goes looking for information that will damage someone’s interests, and then publishes it without discretion or redaction, no matter where it comes from.
Instead of being willing to go to jail to protect a whistleblower, he has hidden in the Ecuadorean embassy while that whistleblower went to prison.
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And now his boosters are trying to claim his case is somehow connected with those of Australian journalists whose work is imperilled by overzealous federal bureaucrats who want the truth suppressed.
That’s a false equivalence. What Julian Assange did in dumping the so-called “war logs” on the internet without editing or redacting was an act of gross irresponsibility.
If he also, as the US apparently claims, helped Manning hack the Defence computer system to steal the documents, he has also facilitated the commission of a pretty straightforward crime.
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I don’t know if Assange did contribute to hacking or not.
But why shouldn’t he face trial?
And why, as Assange’s supporters are now trying to claim, should the UK or Australia protect him from the consequences of those actions?
It’s been nearly a fortnight since Australian Federal Police officers raided the home of one of our journalists, and then the Ultimo headquarters of the ABC in search of information that would identify whistleblowers who leaked stories embarrassing to the senior brass of the Departments of Home Affairs and Defence.
Here’s the difference: the Australian reporters want the right to protect the sources who have aided in the publication of journalism in the public interest.
They — we — want legislative exemptions to ensure we cannot have our homes or offices searched to elicit the identities of people who have provided information the public has a right to know.
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Not helping someone to steal. Not hacking. And certainly not the indiscriminate dumping of information, whatever the consequences.
If you’ve been hacking out the comments streams on articles about the AFP raids in Australia, you’ll have noticed many Australians believe journalists deserve little sympathy: that if we facilitate leaking, we should be in the frame.
Fair enough.
But the point is not us.
It’s the sources brave enough to talk to us. Right now, as always, journalism needs heroes.
Julian Assange is definitely not our guy.
Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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