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The NY Times has a history of trying to smear Assange. The day after they began publishing the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, provided to them by Assange, the NY Tim
by DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
The NY Times has a history of trying to smear Assange. The day after they began publishing the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, provided to them by Assange, the NY Times prominently ran a hit piece about Assange. Here's the opening:
> Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.
> He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own the way other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
The whole point was to paint him as a paranoid control freak, rather than someone who had completely legitimate fears of state surveillance. Does anyone seriously think that Assange was not under surveillance by multiple state intelligence agencies at that point?
Anyways, this is how they treated the person who provided them one of the biggest scoops in the paper's history. If you look at the NY Times page on the War Logs, they still feature the hit piece at the top: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/worl...
Yes, the NY Times has expressed opposition to the prosecution of Assange, but they've hardly reported on his extradition case. They should have this case on the front page every day, given how critical it is to the future of journalism in the US.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI just fundamentally disagree with your characterization of "hit piece" here. The personality and behavior of a source is very relevant information, especially when they're vouching for the authenticity of leaked documents. Maybe his behavior was a reasonable reaction to legitimate fears, but that's a judgment call that readers of the NYT should be able to make for themselves - reporters should not be in the business of strategically hiding information to ensure readers reach the right conclusions.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThere was no question of the authenticity of the documents. The piece was completely unnecessary. Julian Assange himself is irrelevant to the stories that the NY Times published, and readers did not need to know that the NY Times considers Assange paranoid in order to evaluate US military logs. If a NY Times reporter broke a big story, would the NY Times run it next to a smear piece about that reporter's personal habits?