Julian Assange, will argue for his release from prison tomorrow, where he is being held pending questioning from a Swedish over allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in unrelated incidents. There is no guarantee, if he is granted freedom by the presiding judge, he will actually be released.
The Crown Prosecution Service, which will represent the Swedish authorities in the UK court, has the right to appeal against any bail decision. Usually the suspect would still be held in custody anyway until an appeal hearing.
Raj Joshi, a former head of the European and international division at the CPS, and an expert on extradition, said: “The chances of Assange going underground, given that his face was “plastered all around the world”, were low, he added. “With a number of conditions, such as, maybe, a tag, it would be difficult to see why bail would not be granted.”
While the world waits to see what happens tomorrow anything less than Assange’s release will be perceived as the Brit’s judicial system bowing to pressure from across the pond. The real drama playing out these last few weeks is less the persecution and censoring of Wikileaks and more about the failure of modern news reporting to frame their own mediocre performance into the debate.
To say that the WikiLeaks imbroglio has not been journalism’s finest hour fails to capture the extent to which the 4th estate has failed its basic responsibility to inform the public about the activities of government.
Putting aside the sour grapes that comes from being scooped by a rival, it is difficult to recall another occasion when so many journalists and opinionistas have expressed such unremitting hostility to the public’s right to know what is being discussed and decided in their name.
There have been honourable exceptions, but most remarkable is that they remain exceptions to an embarrassing and dishonourable rule.
Scott Burchill points out the media, “…have been exposed by this saga as enthusiastic servants of state power”. Even Assange quipped during an interview of how pathetic it is that a “handful of activists” do a better job of informing the public about what government is really doing versus what government says its doing.
The mediocre response to the state sponsored censoring of Wikileaks by news agencies may be an artifact of having its own failures flaunted in its face but it runs a heady risk achieving grand mediocrity and diminished credibility with its readers.
The media are demonstrating, as Burchill continues,”… what can only be described as a depraved submission to authority and an ever-ready desire to please those in power, their actions have not served the public well”.
There are risks, of course, to actually doing the job the media are supposed to do and Assange is paying a price as we speak. Yesterday, Al Jazeera found its Kuwait office closed by the authorities “over coverage of a police crackdown on a public gathering”.
Have other media reported this? How much coverage was given to the murder of the Reuters journalists or the bombing of Al Jazeera’s office in Iraq that killed two reporters? The biggest defenders of Assange should be the media… where are they?
The fact the US is engaged in the same form of censorship as Kuwait is disturbing enough but the failure of the media to rise up and defend against state sponsored censorship calls into question whether they are in fact news media or just a marketing, propaganda arm of the ruling class.
Movements like Operation:Leakspin may ultimately make the media as we have come to know it, inconsequential. Today’s media seem more intent upon reporting facts than reporting truth and there is a very big distinction between the two.
