NUJ's powerful British Union of Journalists, the National Union of Journalists, joined the struggle to free Julian Assange. Journalists are demanding that the creator of WikiLeaks not be extradited to the Americans and released into the wild, so that it would be disgraceful for the authorities to arrest journalists publishing secret materials. If this practice takes root, they say, the right of the public to know what is really happening will be severely limited, and journalists themselves will be afraid to publish materials that are true but dangerous to their freedom and life.
NUJ joined in the fight, and many journalists have been calling for it a long time. Among them are the wonderful John Pilger and Craig Murray. Two problems hindered the union. One is Assange’s charge of “almost raping,” unprotected intercourse, while his partner insisted on the protection. Nowadays, people are afraid to stand up for men accused of this kind of thing. Even the withdrawal of this charge by the Swedish prosecutor’s office did not completely reassure the union leadership, which adheres to the most strict line of political correctness.
The second problem is newspapers. Although The Guardian and other English newspapers actively published the State Department’s dispatches received by Julian, a black cat the size of a panther ran between the newspapers and the rebellious Australian. Newspapers wanted to embed the WikiLeaks publication narrative in their liberal, Atlantic, anti-Russian, Hillary-Clinton style. In particular, they achieved this with selective and biased editing of the dispatches, in which Nick Cohen and Luke Harding were especially distinguished. When they saw Assange not playing by their rules, they joined the campaign against him. Many journalists, of course, did not want to conflict with employers, and even more so with secret services.
What has changed? Journalists realized that they could be on the line after Assange. After all, if he is imprisoned for 175 years (as the Americans want) for the publication of American classified materials, they may come to them. Many journalists participated in these publications. Technically, a dozen of the world's leading newspapers - The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and others, received access from Assange to his website and published materials themselves. Although American lawyers argued that they would never prosecute journalists, there was no faith in them. You never know what they promised, and then acted exactly the opposite.
A new argument has appeared. Authorities in different countries began to actively persecute whistleblowers and whistleblowers. In the era of the crown of such revelations only increased.
For example, the German whistleblower Stefan Kohn published a 93-page report of a special commission of the German Ministry of Internal Affairs, which the authorities were going to hide from the public. It followed from this report that the German authorities did not heed the words of experts when they introduced their quarantine.
Experts called for a markedly softening of the regimen, which would help save the lives of many other patients, increase life expectancy and get out of a state of panic. But the German authorities silenced the press.
Gagging in other countries. In the United States, Michael Moore's documentary was blocked, which exposed the "conspiracy of the greens," a systematic deception of advocates of "global warming." In France, there is a struggle over the use of cheap quinine to treat patients with the crown. And everywhere there is an urgent need for a free press - and how can there be a free press if journalists are afraid for their life and freedom?
I mentioned Craig Murray, a British journalist, a former ambassador of Her Majesty, who stood up for Assange. Now he himself was on trial - because he allegedly revealed the secrets of the trial of another prisoner, the former Prime Minister of Scotland, leading his program on RT, Alex Salmond.
In this situation, the struggle for Assange becomes especially urgent. This is not just a desire to save an innocently injured and tormented colleague a lot, but also the desire to do our work, the work of journalists, at least a little less dangerous. And it is dangerous these days, as it has not been for a long time. Maybe since the time of Konstantin Simonov and Alexei Surkov, journalists of the Second World War.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.