‘Is it foolish to ask if Assange is a journalist? Clearly, he has committed acts of journalism. And he has published true facts,’ Margaret Simons writes.‘Is it foolish to ask if Assange is a journalist? Clearly, he has committed acts of journalism. And he has published true facts,’ Margaret Simons writes.Unsurprisingly, Assange and Murdoch have gained their notoriety through journalism and the media. More surprising – but significant – is the fact both of them could be described as libertarians.
Some of the discussion about Assange’s guilty plea concerns the question of whether or not he is a journalist. As for citizen journalists, we hear that term less these days, although the phenomenon is very much part of the way the world works.? More recently, much of the material out of Gaza has come to us through social media publication by citizens who don’t necessarily identify as journalists.
One of the main points of contention was the issue of redaction. WikiLeaks didn’t believe in editing. As the then investigations editor of the Guardian, David Leigh, has recalled, “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try to persuade me to cross a few things out’.”
What Assange had not foreseen was that lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation would ride the free internet at least as easily as truth and transparency.