The 'getting’ of Assange and the smearing of a revolution

I asked Leigh why he and the Guardian had adopted a consistently hostile towards Assange since they had parted company. He replied, “Where you, tendentiously, claim to detect a ‘hostile toe’, others might merely see well-informed objectivity.”

It is difficult to find well-informed objectivity in the Guardian’s book on Assange, sold lucratively to Hollywood, in which Assange is described gratuitously as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. In the book, Leigh revealed the secret password Assange had given the paper. Designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables, its disclosure set off a chain of events that led to the release of all the files. The Guardian denies “utterly” it was responsible for the release. What, then, was the point of publishing the password?

The Guardian’s Hackgate exposures were a journalistic tour de force; the Murdoch empire may disintegrate as a result. But with or without Murdoch, a media consensus that echoes, from the BBC to the Sun, a corrupt political, war-mongering establishment.

Assange’s crime has been to threaten this consensus: those who fix the “parameters” of news and political ideas and whose authority as media commissars is challenged by the revolution of the internet.  The prize-winning former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook has experience in both worlds.  “The media, at least the supposedly left-wing component of it,” he writes, “should be cheering on this revolution…And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it [even] to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age…Some of [campaign against Assange] clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle [about] how information should be controlled a generation hence [and] the gatekeepers maintaining their control.”