Some Thoughts On Julian Assange

Assange is free, but journalism seems more shackled than ever.

With his coerced guilty plea this week  to one felony count under the archaic, repressive, anti-democratic Espionage Act, the United States has essentially declared adversarial journalism to be a crime. To say that the plea deal will have a chilling effect on what is still actually left of independent reporting in the public interest is an understatement, given that such reporting already has been frozen out of existence.

From the news deserts resulting from the mass closures of local newspapers and radio stations and thousands of reporters losing their jobs in the process, journalism has largely morphed into a consolidated corporate behemoth whose main function is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and propagandize. Noam Chomsky called it the "manufacture of consent."

But failing at this task, as evidenced by the polls revealing unprecedented distrust in mass media and with the growing numbers of people out in the streets and on social media protesting everything from wars and genocide to capitalism-engendered climatate catastrophes, to the manufacture of consent has been duly added the manufacturing of fear and polarization.

Take the coverage of Julian Assange in the New York Times. The headline in today's "news analysis" of his release from prison casts him not as a journalist and a publisher, but as a "hacker and polarizing figure."

One of the main duties of our six or seven polarizing media giants  is to divide people for the benefit of the conquerors. Rather than address the inconvenient truths and crimes exposed by the likes of Assange,  the default position is to shoot the messenger. It's easier to accuse people that they consider dangerous to the status quo of having personality disorders or malign ulterior motives,  Assange, the Times sniffed, became nothing but a "sideshow"  before becoming "a ghostly throwback to another time."

For a media outlet that's been so obsessed with promoting a sideshow called Trump Derangement for at least the last decade, that epithet is pretty weak. Then again, classic Freudian projection is one of the  few weapons they still have left in their propaganda arsenal.

Only a hack would ever call Assange a hacker, given that he did not personally download or  steal the emails of the rich and powerful which he published in Wikileaks. Chelsea Manning accessed the initial trove of emails related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

And despite the oft-repeated claim that "Russia" hacked the Podesta emails showing that the Democratic National Committee manipulated the 2016 primaries to boost Hillary Clinton - among other embarrassments - officials have readily admitted in sworn testimony that there is no concrete proof that Russia was involved in the theft. But nonetheless, the Times persists to this very day in claiming that Assange was in cahoots with the Kremlin, and by extension, the Trump campaign.

Clinton, who published an op-ed lauding her Broadway production cred in the Times on the same day of Assange's release. had once suggested, while she was Obama's secretary of state "droning" the Wikileaks founder. She went on to pontificate about the sideshow known as the Trump-Biden debate, scheduled to air on the CNN behemoth tonight.

And in today's Times news analysis, the reporters even went so far as to imply that any "chilling effect" has been not on journalists, but on poor Hillary herself. To wit:

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent by American diplomats to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf nation refused to allow note takers into a meeting with her, for fear that his comments would be leaked.

Fear is the keyword here. Assange inserted an unaccustomed fear into the hardened hearts of  the rich, the powerful and the secretive. Disclosures of their crimes and lies robbed them of that power, permanently. Those shackles they've devised show signs of rusting out, at least among independent writers and broadcasters. That "chilling effect" on journalism that the Assange persecution engendered could, paradoxically, be the very stimulus required to thaw our minds right of the propaganda deep freeze. That is my hope, anyway. The only ting we have to fear is their fear, itself. Cornered predators can be very dangerous indeed.

The eyes of the whole world were opened thanks to Assange and Wikileaks. And they'll remain open despite the best efforts of the overlords to tape them shut, right along with our mouths.

The sideshow is them, and the reviews are pouring in. And they're devastating.

******

I will be watching the CNN sideshow tonight and writing it up either tomorrow or Saturday. Meantime, if any of you would like to weigh in sooner, please use the comment section. Blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute reactions as the action happens are more than welcome.