{"id":403464,"date":"2019-04-21T05:01:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-21T04:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/formerly-jailed-australian-journalist-fronts-corporate-media-attack-on-julian-assange\/"},"modified":"2019-04-21T05:01:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-21T04:01:50","slug":"formerly-jailed-australian-journalist-fronts-corporate-media-attack-on-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/formerly-jailed-australian-journalist-fronts-corporate-media-attack-on-julian-assange\/","title":{"rendered":"Formerly-jailed Australian journalist fronts corporate media attack on Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Formerly-jailed Australian journalist fronts corporate media attack on Julian Assange<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    Mike Head<br \/>\n    <br \/>20 April 2019<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p> 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 \u201cliberal\u201d media\u2014the Melbourne <em>Age, Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> and other Nine Media outlets.<\/p>\n<p>The opinion column was penned by a journalist who was once incarcerated himself on trumped-up charges. Peter Greste declared: \u201cTo be clear, Julian Assange is not a journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By that pronouncement, Greste aligned himself directly behind the Trump administration\u2019s bogus \u201cconspiracy\u201d charges and the refusal of the Australian political establishment to intervene to secure the freedom of Assange, an Australian citizen.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s efforts to railroad Assange to prison.<\/p>\n<p>Greste wrote the column in his capacity as \u201ca founding director and spokesman for the Alliance for Journalists\u2019 Freedom and UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland.\u201d In it, he set out, in unvarnished form, the agenda behind all the corporate media attacks on Assange.<\/p>\n<p> Greste declared: \u201cJournalism 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 <em>what is genuinely in the public interest<\/em>&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2019\/04\/20\/gres-a20.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 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 \u201cliberal\u201d media\u2014the Melbourne Age, Sydney Morning Herald and other Nine Media outlets. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-403464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}