In an exclusive essay for the New Statesman, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, argues that the whistleblowing website is a return to the days of the once-popular radical press. He also discusses why the New York Times dislikes the website and reveals the biggest threat to WikiLeaks today.
“WikiLeaks is part of an honourable tradition that expands the scope of freedom by trying to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” writes Assange, who compares WikiLeaks to the pamphleteers of the English civil war and the radical press of the early 20th century. “We are, in a sense, a pure expression of what the media should be: an intelligence agency of the people, casting pearls before swine.”
Assange argues that the New York Times‘s hostility to WikiLeaks stems from the newspaper’s illiberal tradition of failing to back organisations or figures that challenge established elites. He highlights the newspaper’s failure to support the American pacifist and anti-war campaigner Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for ten years for making an anti-war speech in 1918.
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“The New York Times, true to form, had been calling for [Debs’s] imprisonment for more than two decades, saying in an editorial of 9 July 1894 that Debs was ‘a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race. There has been quite enough talk about warrants against him and about arresting him,’ ” writes Assange. “Seen within this historical perspective, the New York Times‘s performance in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, and its hostile attitude to WikiLeaks today, are not surprising.”
In its major leaks, the website only agreed to work with the NYT, among others, “for reasons of realpolitik”, according to Assange.
WikiLeaks is able to succeed because, unlike many of its forebears, it does not rely on advertisers, he continues. “As well as the hostility of governments, popular grass-roots publishers have had to face the realities of advertising as a source of revenue. [T]he Daily Herald . . . was forced to close despite being among the 20 largest-circulation dailies in the world, because its largely working-class readers did not constitute a lucrative advertising market.”
WikiLeaks has other problems, however, writes Assange: “How do we deal with an extrajudicial financial blockade by Bank of America, Visa (including Visa Europe, registered in London), MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, the Swiss PostFinance, Moneybookers and other finance companies, all keen to curry favour with Washington?”
To read the piece in full, pick up a copy of this week’s New Statesman, on news-stands from Thursday, or click here to subscribe to the magazine.