“Captured” media refuses to defend Julian Assange

The new president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, seems somewhat antsy; recent speculation suggests he's keen to offload the problem that is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, a man enjoying asylum (or arbitrary detention, depending on how you view the UN's ruling on the situation) in Ecuador's embassy in London. RT's Margarita Simonyan reports that Ecuador may expel Assange and, whether directly or indirectly, hand him over to UK authorities within days or weeks.

There are currently no known charges against Assange in the UK; he faces only a warrant for failure to appear in court. The Swedish investigation pertaining to a rape allegation against Assange has been dropped. But the UK is likely to extradite him to the US if a formal request is made. When Stefania Maurizi wrote last Thursday that “WikiLeaks has the full force of the State against it,” she was surely referring primarily to that large, “United” one on this side of the pond.

The CIA, for example, employs about 500 people on its Wikileaks Task Force. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has stated that arresting Assange is a “priority.” The DNC has recently filed suit against Assange and Wikileaks (and is trying to serve its complaint via Twitter), claiming the organization conspired to aid the Trump campaign. Vault 7 (the CIA cyber weapons) seems to be the most egregious leak in the government's eyes, but also the most ironic considering how many well-couched Americans seem to approve when a surveillant government hacks their phone, but are critical when a whistleblower hacks a government email server.

The question here should ultimately be, why aren't more organizations than just Wikileaks trying to uncover and expose corruption on government servers? Maurizi concluded that, “At the end of the day corporate media are corporations: many decide they can afford only limited legal risks. As for the extralegal risks, few traditional editors and journalists are eager to end up confined to an embassy for six years.” Yet I would argue the exact opposite -- most corporatist journalists are willing to take a very different risk: being exposed for their collusion with a government to which they're comfortably well-connected.

It's not just regulatory capture that occurs as a result of Washington's revolving door, that dizzying portal allowing people to move from a position of government regulator to that of well-paid employee of said regulated corporation (or vice versa). In fact, a huge number of revolving-door journalists have succumbed to something called “media capture,” as illustrated by this admittedly perfunctory venn diagram in yellow. Romanian journalist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi defined the phenomenon this way: “By ‘media capture’ I mean a situation in which the media have not succeeded in becoming autonomous in manifesting a will of their own, nor able to exercise their main function, notably of informing people. Instead, they have persisted in an intermediate state, with vested interests, and not just the government, using them for other purposes.”

And in addition to the many journalists who have worked for the very people they are tasked to impartially cover, there are just as many who are literally in bed with the people they're expected to expose, should public-sector wrongdoing occur. During the Obama administration, Jay Carney was the White House Press Secretary from 2011 through 2014. He was Time magazine's Washington bureau deputy chief until 2008, when he left to become Vice President Biden's director of communications. But even more troubling was the fact that Carney's wife, Claire Shipman, was a correspondent for ABC News (and still is). Not surprisingly, after leaving the White House, Jay Carney worked briefly as a senior political analyst for CNN.

That's but one example. Joe Concha, writing for The Hill, counted as many as 25 former reporters (just reporters) who joined the Obama administration. ABC News reporter Matthew Jaffe married Katie Hogan, Obama's former deputy press secretary, back in 2012. Joe Lockhart reported for Sky News before joining the Clinton White House as press secretary. And at least six former members of Congress come to mind who now work for such media outlets as Fox News and CBS.

Do we really expect that our well-connected members of the news media are going to dig up and report on the type of corruption that an organization like Wikileaks exposes? Not only are our captured journalists failing to do their job; they have no words of support for this real journalist who has risked everything and faces a perilous unknown future. Perhaps before relegating Julian Assange to a forgotten list of publicly abandoned whistleblowers the United States government is allowed to imprison (or worse), we should examine our priorities regarding just what makes a member of the media valuable enough to defend.

[ A similar (edited) version of this article was published yesterday at Eagle Action Report. This content is my own intellectual property. -Stephanie Herman (@geke) ]