Julian Assange awarded top UK Journalism Prize

WikiLeaks founder wins prestigious prize for journalism.

By Emanuelle Degli Esposti Published 02 June 2011

The internet activist and founder of whistleblower website, WikiLeaks, has been awarded the highly prestigious Martha Gelhorn Prize for Journalism 2011.

The prize is presented annually to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gelhorn called it."

The judges ruled unanimously in favour of Julian Assange, whose work in exposing classified information to the public was described as "a truth-telling that has empowered people all over the world."

"As publisher and editor [of WikiLeaks], Julian Assange represents that which journalists once prided themselves in - he's brave, determined, independent: a true agent of people not of power."

WikiLeaks rose to prominence in early 2010 when it published documents on the American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In November 2010, the website published a cache of several thousand U.S. Diplomatic cables that revealed the diploma workings behind American foreign relations. This lead to the denouncement of the website and its founder by several high-profile politicisans, including U.S. Secretary of state Hilary Clinton and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Assange is currently residing in Britain, where in February 2011 he appealed a decision by English courts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning in relation to sexual assault allegations.

The panel also awarded a Martha Gelhorn Special Award for Journalism to Umar Cheema, of the International Times of Pakistan, Charles Clover, Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, and Jonathan Cook, the independent journalist based in Nazareth.

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Tags: journalism Julian Assange wikileaks

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15 comments

Mon, 2011-06-06 04:33 — kritik1 (not verified)

A tribute to a world class hero:

We were slaves. We were slaves of government where the government version was thrusted down our throats, and since we did not know the facts and the truths, we accepted those un-knowingly to be the truth.

A star was born, and the star was no other than Julian Assange. The flood gates opened in November of 2010 and nothing seemed to suppress the will of the people of the world to take a peak at the evidence - all black and white, all without any censors, and all without a single comment from Julian Assange.

Such is the greatness and the LEGACY OF JULIAN ASSANGE.

Today Julian Assange is not an Aussie journalist or an International journalist, or a foreign journalist, he is respected as the "Peoples Journalist".

Thu, 2011-06-02 18:51 — ShawnSmith (not verified)

If journalism constituted writing stuff, there would be very little journalism in the world. That's just a completely ignorant statement rjp. You're a travesty.

Sat, 2011-06-04 00:34 — Mr. Divine (not verified)

No awards are prestigious. They are all bull shit.

Sat, 2011-06-04 00:36 — Mr. Divine (not verified)

I award you a great big dollop of dog muck.
You have a dog muck award. Well done.

Thu, 2011-06-02 22:07 — Tom (not verified)

I know an extradition order is still pending in the U.K. courts. However, if it's approved and he's extradited to Sweden, then possibly to the States and ends up in jail, won't that look kind of bad? Awarding a convicted criminal a national award?

Thu, 2011-06-02 22:35 — Jim (not verified)

@Tom: Do you really need me to dig out a list of 'convicted criminals' who've had heaps of awards? How about Nelson Mandela? Not all convictions are fair, and even if Asange's is it has nothing to do with this award or Journalism. This isn't about how things 'look'. It's about truth.

Thu, 2011-06-02 23:27 — A (not verified)

Julian Assange != Nelson Mendela

Fri, 2011-06-03 01:34 — Nas (not verified)

Tom: that's the wrong concern. What should be an issue is jailing someone who has received this award (for the same thing that got him the award in the first place). Also, there is no inherent contradiction or problem in awarding a prize that assumes the role of journalists is (among other things) to expose the lies and misconduct of governments and powerful individuals so that they can be held to account to someone who, subsequently, is jailed by people who believe that the role of journalists is (pretty much exclusively) to print what is handed to them in press releases, plus stories about cute animals.

Fri, 2011-06-03 02:06 — helper (not verified)

@rjp8791: Investigative journalism != creative writing. Have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism

@Tom: What a strange thing to say. Often investigative journalist end up in jail. A vocal proponent of Assange has been Daniel Ellsberg, see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg. Besides confusing extradition with guilt is pretty irresponsible on your side.

@A: Impressive observation.

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I find it hard to believe that the above commenters are not political staffers

Fri, 2011-06-03 03:09 — Gideon Polya

A well -deserved award to outstanding truth-revealer and Australian and World hero Julian Assange.

Julian Assange's great achievement was not just to get his hands on these thousands of revealing US documents (including horrifying videos) but to convince Mainstream media to publish some of them.

A genuine criticism is that these documents were just providing documentary "from the horse's mouth" evidence of what we already knew from a wealth of other evidence e.g. that the neocon American imperialists and their craven associates are lying, conniving, suborning, racist, mass murdering psychopaths.

Now the big task remaining is to get the cowardly, US-beholden, Zionist -beholden Mainstream media to report the horrendous dimensions of ongoing catastrophes e.g. the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (4.6 million war-related deaths and 2.0 million under-5 infant deaths, 1990-2011: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ ) and the Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide (5.0 million war-related deaths and 2.7 million under-5 infant deaths, 2001-2011: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ ).

It is possible to make a hole in the Mainstream media Wall of Silence, to evade extraordinary Mainstream media censorship (see: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/ ). Thus in 2008 the BBC broadcast a radio program involving myself, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and other scholars about the "forgotten" WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British under Churchill deliberately starved to death 6-7 million Indians in the period 1942-1945 (see: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html ).