After a 12-year ordeal, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was officially freed and returned home to Australia.
However, given the circumstances whole case has raised questions on the future for journalists, whistleblowers and press freedom overall. Meanwhile, critics question whether Julian Assange can be considered a real journalist, given the practices and ethics of Wikileaks.
The Wire’s contributor Jahan Rezakhanlou asked media ethics expert at University of Melbourne, Dr Dennis Muller.
Jahan Rezakhanlou: Thank you very much for joining us, Dennis.
Dr. Dennis Muller: A pleasure, Jahan,
Jahan Rezakhanlou: Some critics are labeling Julian Assange is not actually being a real journalist. Do you consider Julian Assange to be a journalist?
Dr. Dennis Muller: No, he’s not a journalist. He’s a whistleblower. He’s a source for journalists. And that’s the way he was treated by the editors of The Guardian and The New York Times when, after his initial document dump, he went to those newspapers and the German newspaper Der Spiegel, and he gave them the material and he tried to assert himself as a journalist. And Alan Rusbridger, who was the editor-in-chief of The Guardian and who was the main person dealing with Assange, refused to treat him as a journalist, quite rightly in my view. He treated him as a source, as anyone would treat a whistleblower, and that led to great tensions between him and Assange. Assange wanted to have some role in editing the material, and Rusbridger said, no, I’m the editor. I take responsibility for what goes in the paper. So you are treated as a supplier of information, as a source. And I think that in that regard, Rusbridger was entirely right, because what Assange did with the initial document dump was not journalism. Journalism involves taking care to ensure that you are avoiding avoidable and unjustifiable risks. And he did not do that by dumping the material the way he did. He exposed the United States intelligence assets, the individuals in particular, to real danger. Now, as it happens, no danger has followed, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Assange is prepared to take the risk, which was something that none of the three newspaper editors would do. They went through the material they put, they redacted some parts of it because they were concerned that the public interest in publishing was outweighed by the risks. Now that’s journalism. That’s not what Assange did. So I think we should be clear in our minds that Assange is a whistleblower, a very important one, but not a journalist.
Jahan Rezakhanlou: Does Julian Assange’s whole ordeal as a whistleblower raise questions on the future of journalism, whistleblowing and press freedom overall?
Dr. Dennis Muller: Absolutely it does. It was an exercise in rank intimidation by the United States, aided and abetted by the British and possibly the Swedish, to basically discourage anyone from even thinking of doing something like this again. And what Assange did a good deal of the material that he published was clearly in the public interest, and in particular, that shooting by the American military from a helicopter, shooting a group of civilians, including a couple of Reuters correspondents, was more or less a war crime. And it’s clearly in the public interest to report when the military of the United States commits a war crime. So there was a very high public interest, and none of the governments involved have placed any weight at all on the public interest that Assange served. They set out merely to punish him and to intimidate others from doing anything like it in the future. People have seen what happened to him, what happened to his original informant, who was a member of the US military. And they will think not just twice, but three times before they release anything like that. And I think whistleblowers in general, whether they to do with military intelligence or not, will look at this and think, is it worth the risk? So that’s a serious problem for press freedom because journalists journalism has two sides to it. One side is the side of the source, the provider of the material that was the side represented by Julian Assange. The other side is the journalist who receives the material and then makes journalistic assessments and and applies journalistic filters to it. Verification, harm minimisation, fairness and so on. So journalism has these two sides. And if you impede one side, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the source side or the journalist side. If you impede either of those sides, of course you impede journalism and you prevent the flow of information to the public.
Jahan Rezakhanlou: What do you think will be the future of Wikileaks and Julian Assange himself?
Dr. Dennis Muller: Very hard to say what the future of Julian Assange is. I think he will have to go through a substantial period of physical and mental recovery. So what part he plays in Wikileaks for the foreseeable future, I don’t know. Wikileaks itself has gone on in his absence. And I think what some of what it’s done does raise questions about Wikileaks, for example, when it dumped the Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 election that had a profound effect on the presidential elections. And once again, it seems to have been done without regard for the possible consequences. I think in that respect, Wikileaks showed themselves to be not only irresponsible, but naive. They seem not to realize that the material was part of a Russian attempt to undermine American democracy. So I think we need to be cautious about regarding Wikileaks as a sort of heroic institution. I think they’ve done some very good work, but I think that their overall approach to this, the sort of unrestrained dumping of documents, is irresponsible and can have consequences which they’re not prepared to even take into account.
Jahan Rezakhanlou: Thank you very much, Dennis.
Dr. Dennis Muller: Thanks, Jahan.