Assange is free

But does it signal a return to press freedom?

It’s incredibly good news that Julian Assange has been freed and is on his way home to Australia. However, he should never have been persecuted and imprisoned for all these years for merely doing his job as a journalist.

His ‘crime’ was to publish classified US government documents leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, a US government employee, exposing US government malfeasance and serious abuses by US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was highly embarrassing to US leaders so like thugs they went after Assange.

Assange didn’t break any law. Journalists publish classified information all the time. If journalists were jailed each time they did this, the prisons would be full. But they rarely are because what Assange did was not a crime. The crimes were committed by the US government.

It’s a joke to call the US or the UK, for that matter, liberal democracies, when they attempt to silence those who expose their misdeeds to the public as Assange did. When governments try to hide their actions, they make it impossible for the public to judge and criticise their behaviour. That’s why journalists like Assange are so important and increasingly rare - they reveal the information the public needs in order to hold their leaders to account.

The Pentagon Papers is a classic example of when the press did its job. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a government insider, leaked classified documents about the US war in Vietnam to the New York Times. The documents showed the Johnson administration was lying to the American people about the progress of the war. Their publication by the New York Times changed the course of the disastrous conflict which eventually ended in 1975. Ellsberg didn’t go to prison for leaking the documents and the New York Times journalists didn’t go to prison for publishing them. That’s because the First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the press.

What Assange did is no different from what the New York Times did in 1971 - it wasn’t illegal. But governments, even those who call themselves liberal democracies, hate leakers who expose their bad behaviour. Yet we know that the US government leaks information and, more frequently, disinformation all the time and today’s mainstream media duly publishes it. In fact, the mainstream media rarely criticises the US government but unquestioningly accepts what it’s told by that government and/or self-censors out of fear. The corporate media has become no more than a glorified stenographer and has failed miserably to hold power to account.

The situation in the failing UK is no better than in the US, where the media has similarly been captured by corporate interests and refuses to hold the powerful to account.

I hope that Assange’s release will give other journalists the courage to do their job which is to inform and educate the public and expose corruption and abuses of power wherever they may be found.