Having ‘political objective’ disqualifies Assange ‘from being considered a journalist,’ State Dept. says
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Who is and is not a journalist? In a hyper-connected age where anyone and everyone can become a publisher in seconds, the word's definition seems increasingly intangible and ever-evolving.The US State Department, however, appears to have crossed that very muddy line with its criticism of secrets outlet WikiLeaks.
Speaking to reporters recently, State Dept. Assistant Secretary Philip Rowley said that the United States does not consider WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be a "journalist" or "whistleblower." He insisted that, under US law, he's to be considered a "political actor."
His criteria for reclassifying someone from protected "journalist" to a legally vulnerable "political actor": "Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist," Crowley said.
Asked what Assange's political objective is, he replied: "I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist."
That seems to bump up against the opinion of Charlie Beckett, who directs journalism studies and media criticism at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In a presentation published online Friday, he argued that much of WikiLeaks' activities meet the definition of "traditional journalism."
The presentation is embedded below and can be viewed online at Beckett's personal website. The slides, he wrote, were to complement a forthcoming lecture.
Update: Beckett wrote to Raw Story that his presentation "starts by saying that Wikileaks shares the characteristics of traditional journalism, but then it goes on to argue that it is doing something new. In fact, it is challenging the very basis of traditional mainstream media (and possibly mainstream politics, too)."
He added: "As for journalists having opinions or ideological motives? Well of course they all do, it's just that some are more overt than others."
Crowley's statement -- that having a political objective behind one's communications disqualifies the messenger from key legal protections -- would appear to implicate more than just Assange in the non-journalist arena. Two of America's 24-hour cable news networks are explicit in their ideological bent, with one very regularly taking cues from partisan ideologues who hold obvious political objectives.
And it's not just partisan television outlets either: many of America's longest standing, most storied journalistic institutions occasionally act on political objective and ideological motivation. A complete list would number in the thousands.
The State Dept. position begs the question: Who else would the US consider disqualified from such a classification?
Media vs. The State
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian national, was being held in a British prison Friday, days after turning himself in on an unrelated charge of sexual assault in Sweden. Assange's attorney pledged they would fight extradition to Sweden and claimed that the country's prosecutor had been playing a game of "cat and mouse" with them. Documents detailing the charges against Assange have not yet been released and one of the suspects, Anna Ardin, was said to have stopped cooperating with authorities.
US officials said they were investigating whether he could be prosecuted for espionage, but US laws against such spying, written in the early 1900s, do not apply to anyone outside of government. If Assange is successfully prosecuted by the US, he would be the first foreign citizen outside of government to be found guilty of the crime in the US.
Assange and WikiLeaks maintain they did not steal secret US State Dept. cables. US Army Private Bradley Manning stands accused of stealing the information and faces a penalty of up to life in prison if convicted.
The US Supreme Court ruled in its decision on the Pentagon Papers that The New York Times was fully within its rights to reveal atrocities committed by the US in the Vietnam war, after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg broke with the Nixon administration and went public with the secret documents.
So far, the vast majority of US diplomatic cables have been published by traditional media outlets. WikiLeaks claims to have over 250,000 such documents, less than 1 percent of which have been released.
Even if Assange is prosecuted, it's not likely to stop the rest of the cables from being leaked. WikiLeaks remains online and new stories have continued to surface almost every hour of every day, amid what many have called the world's first "cyber war" over their censorship.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of WikiLeaks' fiercest critics on Capitol Hill, said recently that media outlets could also be investigated for reporting on the website's disclosures.
"But whether they've committed a crime, I think that bears very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department," he said.
Similarly, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) -- who recently called for WikiLeaks to be classified a "foreign terrorist organization" -- told Fox News on Friday that he also supports the prosecution of media outlets for their coverage of the so-called "cablegate" scandal.
This slideshow was created by British media scholar Charlie Beckett, published on Dec. 10, 2010.
What’s New About Wikileaks?
December 10th, 2010
This is a slide show for a talk I am giving on Wikileaks. It is a simple attempt to start exploring what is new about Wikileaks in terms of politics and journalism.You can access it by clicking on the image or here
Surreal Media Is The Real Media: From C**t to Wikileaks
December 6th, 2010
Real News?
Perhaps the speed and complexity of our modern multi-platform 24/7 news world makes it even more prone to a focus on process not fact. It’s easy to slip into a Twitterverse that is only connected to the real world by hyperlinks.
Of course, there’s a long tradition of people like Chomsky arguing that mainstream news media is a confection made up of capitalism, consumerism and conceits. As a former TV news maker I am particularly aware of what an artifice it can be. Every day you pick a selection of images to represent the world in 55 minutes. In that sense, news is more of a metaphor than a record. But it is still about seeking truth.
I used to have a colleague at Channel 4 News who always used to puncture my rambling narratives about the multi-layered significance of various stories by asking one simple, awkward question: What Do We Know For Sure? In other words, what verified facts do you know? What genuine first-hand material do you possess? Who? What? Where? When? Leave the Why? for later.
As I say, there’s nothing new about this. Throughout the history of journalism there have been artificial agendas and built-in biases as well as mendacity, laziness and over-heated imaginations. Wikileaks is a good example of how things have changed.
As the BBC’s Kevin Marsh has pointed out this kind of total revelation of the facts can actually be more confusing if the publication lacks what Kevin calls ‘salience’. The journalism has to involve judgement about what matters and why we are putting in into the public sphere.
But Wikileaks also allows us to see more directly for ourselves What We Know, even if it can never be ‘for sure.’ I’m not saying that what Assange is doing it perfect, but by working with other news organisations he is creating a fascinating and challenging mix of open and networked journalism.
Unless the US and other governments can shut this down, then news life is going to go on being complex and even more surreal.
The POLIS Media Dialogues: What Is Media For? The Answers (guest-blog)
December 5th, 2010
What is it for?
As is so often the case with good debates, we seem to be coming away from the autumn Polis Media Dialogues Series with more questions than answers. Here are just some of the many questions raised as we look back on this season’s dialogues. Read the rest of this entry »
How even the best papers still misreport HIV & AIDS (guest-blog)
December 2nd, 2010This article is by the new POLIS Silverstone Scholar Marco Scalvini.
The media play the important role of informing the public about what it means to live with HIV today. But journalists need to report about HIV with a more accurate language.
For example, despite the fact that AIDS and HIV are two of the world’s most recognized acronyms, journalists still tend to confuse the terms. HIV is a virus detected by a blood test. AIDS is the late stage of HIV infection, when a person’s immune system is damaged severely. Thus, HIV may result in AIDS, but having HIV does not mean a person has AIDS. Read the rest of this entry »
The media play the important role of informing the public about what it means to live with HIV today. But journalists need to report about HIV with a more accurate language.
For example, despite the fact that AIDS and HIV are two of the world’s most recognized acronyms, journalists still tend to confuse the terms. HIV is a virus detected by a blood test. AIDS is the late stage of HIV infection, when a person’s immune system is damaged severely. Thus, HIV may result in AIDS, but having HIV does not mean a person has AIDS. Read the rest of this entry »
Media Plurality: the Newscorp/BSkyB Debate
December 2nd, 2010
Rusbridger
Here’s the line-up so far.
Our panel will be chaired by Steve Hewlett, writer, broadcaster and media consultant. The panel will feature: Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian, David Elstein (Former CEO, Channel 5) Chris Goodall, Consultant to Enders Analysis on regulatory and competition issues, and a former member of the UK Competition Commission, Professor Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster, Pablo Ibanez Colomo (LSE Law) and Damian Tambini from the LSE’s Department of Media and Communications.
It’s Tuesday 14th December 2010 Please arrive for 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start.
The location is the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, Aldwych, LSE, WC2 Drinks will be served before the event at 5.30pm and afterwards at 7pm
Please RSVP if you wish to come to polis@lse.ac.uk
Directions and maps.
This event is in partnership with a the LSE Media Policy Project which is a new venture by the LSE’s Department of Media and Communications to create a series of seminars looking at topical media policy issues with a blog.
Globalisation, media and UK communities
November 30th, 2010
I have written a paper commissioned as part of JRF’s programme on Globalisation, which explores and promotes awareness of the impacts of globalisation on the UK and focuses on communities and people in poverty. It:- examines how global media has changed and its impact on low-income groups in the UK;
- explains how communities in the UK benefit from and influence their global news consumption; and
- discusses the potential widening of the digital divide.
Wikileaks: now that’s what I call an informed society…
November 29th, 2010
The timing could not have been better. I am in Dubai to lead a global council discussion on Informed Societies with some top people from journalism, public relations, social media and universities. The Wikileaks revelations of how international diplomacy really works are a live experiment in how to inform the world through networked journalism, the combination of new media technologies and practices with traditional mainstream media and core journalistic principles.But it also sets the ethical cat amongst the freedom of expression pigeons. Does this kind of publicity make it impossible for diplomats to have the confidentiality that makes negotiations possible?
This is how the New York Times reported the reaction of the US administration: Read the rest of this entry »
Public Service Broadcasting: Is the Golden Era Still to Come? (guestblog)
November 28th, 2010With the BBC apparently under siege it’s easy to think that public service broadcasting as a concept is also threatened. But there is no reason why we can’t chose to have more, not less, argues one eminent expert.
POLIS intern Beth Lowell reports.
Is the Golden Era of public service broadcasting still to come? According to Professor Caroline Pauwels the answer to this question is yes, but only if we work for it. Read the rest of this entry »
POLIS intern Beth Lowell reports.
Is the Golden Era of public service broadcasting still to come? According to Professor Caroline Pauwels the answer to this question is yes, but only if we work for it. Read the rest of this entry »
How to get a positive image into a hostile media: student demo 2
November 25th, 2010
Girl and van
Boy and van
Last time they all went for one violent image which was itself rather staged. Some people were very angry at what they saw as blatent media distortion. But as I pointed out at the time, the different papers had nuanced narratives of the actual demonstration.
This time a few of the picture editors (including the Telegraph, Mail and Metro in various editions) gave prominence to the much more interesting picture (one version above left) which told the story of how most of the students on the march wanted a peaceful process. The vast majority were aware that violence would misrepresent their cause. Read the rest of this entry »
Celebrity journalism: the end is nigh?
November 23rd, 2010
Sam Delaney is one of our leading celebrity magazine editors and one of the most thoughtful journalists I’ve heard for a while. In a sparkling, frank talk he laid out a vision of the genre that was in turns delightful and disturbing. Here’s a selection of the Thoughts of Sam. Read the rest of this entry »
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