Posted: Sep 20, 2020 8:59 pm
Yeah, so it's ironic because the media has made a very flamboyant showing, ever since Trump got elected, of announcing that they would be these very vigilant soldiers safeguarding the sanctity of a free press. The Washington Post famously adopted a motto designed to signal that, "Democracy Dies In Darkness". Jim Acosta made a lot of money selling a book that depicted himself as this endangered, imperilled warrior, because he stood up to a fascist regime, even though the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he had a few mean tweets written about him. So there really haven't been very many actual assaults on a free press unique to the Trump administration. There've been continuations of assaults that originated with the Obama administration, like prosecuting sources like Reality Winner and others, but there haven't really been any new ones, except for one.
And that one is the attempt to criminalize Julian Assange for the work that he did with his source, based on an extremely pernicious theory that if you try and help your source evade detection and getting caught - which is what they claim he did when he tried to help her crack a password so that she could do what she was doing anonymously - that you become part of the criminal conspiracy. If this succeeds, this will be by far the greatest frontal assault on a free press, not just in the last 4 years, but within the last couple of decades.
And yet the same media outlets that've made such a flamboyant showing of claiming that they're gonna safeguard, at all costs, freedom of the press, have barely paid any attention to this ongoing attempt to extradite and then prosecute and imprison Julian Assange in the United States for the crime of publishing top secret information in 2010 that revealed serious war crimes and other deceit and criminality on the part of the US government, because they don't really look at Julian Assange as being one of them. They don't really care - that's part of it.
And the other part of it is that there're a lot of liberals... which now includes the media, and also sort of Democratic Party operatives and the like, who really do have this authoritarian strain. They believe that their political adversaries ought to be punished and imprisoned. That anyone who helped Donald Trump is basically a criminal. And since they see Julian Assange as somebody who helped Donald Trump, it's not just that they're indifferent to his imprisonment. They actually want it. They want him to end up in prison. Even though the indictment has nothing to do with anything he did during the 2016 election. It's based exclusively on the 2010 leaks of the Reuters reporters being murdered by US helicopters, and all the leaks from Chelsea Manning.