{"id":402646,"date":"2019-04-08T01:03:41","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T00:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/is-assange-a-journalist-consortiumnews\/"},"modified":"2019-04-08T01:03:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T00:03:41","slug":"is-assange-a-journalist-consortiumnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/is-assange-a-journalist-consortiumnews\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Assange a Journalist? \u2013 Consortiumnews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When someone says \u201cAssange isn\u2019t a journalist\u201d, they aren\u2019t telling you what Assange is. They\u2019re showing you who they are, says Caitlin Johnstone. Plus Ray McGovern answered the question on CNN nine years ago.
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By Caitlin Johnstone<\/a><\/span>
<\/strong>CaitlinJohnstone.com<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>
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The reason this talking point comes up, of course, is because the WikiLeaks founder is besieged by powerful forces who are attempting to imprison him for publishing inconvenient facts about them, and his defenders often voice their concerns about what this means for the future of press freedoms. The completely baseless claim that Assange is \u201cnot a journalist\u201d is used in an attempt to defuse the argument that his prosecution by the U.S. government could lead to the same fate for any news media outlet which publishes leaks on the US government anywhere in the world. If he\u2019s not a journalist, then his prosecution sets no precedent for real journalists.<\/span><\/p>\n

This argument, if you can call it that, is fallacious for a number of reasons. For starters, as\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>\u2018s Glenn Greenwald explained last year<\/a><\/span>, there\u2019s not any legal distinction in the U.S. Constitution between news media outlets like the The New York Times<\/em> and an outlet which solely focuses on publishing leaks. If you set the precedent with any publisher, you\u2019re necessarily setting it for all of them. Greenwald writes the following:<\/span><\/p>\n

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To begin with, the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment isn\u2019t confined to \u201clegitimate news outlets\u201d \u2013 whatever that might mean. The First Amendment isn\u2019t available only to a certain class of people licensed as \u201cjournalists.\u201d It protects not a privileged group of people called \u201cprofessional journalists\u201d but rather\u00a0an activity<\/em>: namely, using the press (which at the time of the First Amendment\u2019s enactment meant the literal printing press) to inform the public about…<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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When someone says \u201cAssange isn\u2019t a journalist\u201d, they aren\u2019t telling you what Assange is. They\u2019re showing you who they are, says Caitlin Johnstone. Plus Ray McGovern answered the question on CNN nine years ago. By Caitlin JohnstoneCaitlinJohnstone.com\u00a0 As\u00a0discussed Saturday, whenever Julian Assange is in the news and people are defending him you always see a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-402646","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}