Formerly-jailed Australian journalist fronts corporate media attack on Julian Assange
By
Mike Head
20 April 2019
Literally within hours of the April 11 arrest of Julian Assange, a scurrilous and craven attack on the WikiLeaks founder was featured by the erstwhile “liberal” media—the Melbourne Age, Sydney Morning Herald and other Nine Media outlets.
The opinion column was penned by a journalist who was once incarcerated himself on trumped-up charges. Peter Greste declared: “To be clear, Julian Assange is not a journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.”
By that pronouncement, Greste aligned himself directly behind the Trump administration’s bogus “conspiracy” charges and the refusal of the Australian political establishment to intervene to secure the freedom of Assange, an Australian citizen.
To the disgust of those whose protests helped free Greste in 2015 from his 400-day imprisonment by the US-backed military junta, headed by ex-general Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, he is now trading on the reputation he acquired as a victim of attacks on press freedom to support Washington’s efforts to railroad Assange to prison.
Greste wrote the column in his capacity as “a founding director and spokesman for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom and UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland.” In it, he set out, in unvarnished form, the agenda behind all the corporate media attacks on Assange.
Greste declared: “Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility. To effectively fulfil the role of journalism in a democracy, there is an obligation to seek out what is genuinely in the public interest…