Ellsberg, for instance, states “if that’s a crime, then journalism is a crime,” noting he had been asked on numerous occasions by numerous journalists to provide them with more information. He adds “unauthorized disclosures of this kind are the life’s blood of a republic.”

Not all journalists fallen victim to the fetish for making journalism a special protected class of approved experts

https://mises.org/wire/yes-julian-assange-journalist-%E2%80%94-shouldnt-matter

Ryan McMaken

Julian Assange was arrested last week in London, and he awaits legal proceedings designs to extradite him to the United States to be tried on hacking charges. At least, those are the charges currently known. Experience suggests that US authorities are likely to add additional charges once they have Assange in the US.

The US government has sought to prosecute Assange since at least 2010 when Wikileaks released video footage of US forces murdering civilians — including two Reuters reporters — during 2007 air strikes.

Many additional leaks followed, which served to make Wikileaks and Assange the enemies of a diverse number of politicians, bureaucrats, and government intelligence agencies. Thus, his arrest has long appeared nearly inevitable.

“Journalists” Against Assange

Given Assange’s role in exposing government lies, corruption, and abuse, one would think that most journalists — most of whom fancy themselves as warriors against government abuse — would call for his release.

That’s not what happened. Instead, many self-described journalists have claimed that Assange isn’t a journalist at all.

In the wake of his arrest, The Washington Post and USNews both dispatched columnists to define Assange as not-a-journalist. Not surprisingly, the right-wing media — e.g., National Review and Commentary — which reliably sides with the military establishment, has also denied Assange is a journalist.

But why exactly is he not a journalist?

According to Kathleen Parker, writing for The Washington Post: “He is not, after all, a journalist, despite his claiming to be, because he isn’t accountable to anyone. No filters, no standards.”

Parker goes on to claim that real journalists must subject their work huge corporate media outlets like The New York Times or The Washington Post, thus allowing editors at those organizations to then decide what information ought to be considered worthy of public disclosure.

Writing for US News, Susan Milligan claims Assange is not a journalist because his motivations are not sufficiently pure. She claims Assange released certain information for the purposes of retribution or personal amusement.The fact that this information was also potentially significant in identifying government abuse and corruption is apparently irrelevant to Milligan. In her mind, “legitimate journalism” is defined by your feelings about the information being released.

Not all journalists fallen victim to the fetish for making journalism a special protected class of approved experts…

An Arbitrary Standard

Most of the “standards” the media establishment are using to redefine Assange as a non-journalist are purely arbitrary. Whether or not one gets the approval of someone at The Washington Post or some other “official” media outlet has exactly nothing to do with whether or not one is a journalist.

[RELATED: “‘Objective Journalism’ Has Always Been a Myth” by Ryan McMaken]

After all, the standards used by journalists today to define their exclusive group were invented less that a century ago. They were pushed by those who wanted to popularize  the idea of “expert” journalists who could dictate to the general public as to what information was relevant to the public interest.

In her column against Assange, Milligan defines journalism as “collecting information, checking the facts, getting the perspectives of the people affected by the information, and then putting all of it together in a way that puts the details in perspective.” But she’s just repeating quaint bromides they teach undergraduates in journalism school.

Prior to the triumph of the Progressive myth of journalist “experts,” the definition of journalism was far more broad, and far more flexible. Although today’s J-school priesthood insists not just anyone can call himself a journalist, that certainly wasn’t the case in the days when anti-slavery activists routinely set up their own newspapers to report on the realities of slavery in America.

Yes, people like William Lloyd Garrison and Elijah P. Lovejoy were ideological anti-slavery activists. But they were also journalists. Virtually no one disputes this today, although pro-slavery activists at the time certainly denounced these newspapermen as mere agitators and Jacobins.

Unfortunately for the slave drivers of the antebellum South, Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post wasn’t around to demand that the first-hand testimonies of escaped slaves — a common feature in the abolitionist newspapers — be submitted first to the wise editors of The New York Times. Only then, it seems, could we know if anti-slavery information was in the “public interest.” Given that the mainstream press of the period opposed abolitionism for the most part, we could expect that the slave narratives would have been deemed “irresponsible” and not up to the standards of “journalism.”

Thank goodness out modern-day gatekeepers weren’t around then…

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