Why Journalists Aren’t Standing Up for WikiLeaks
Three reasons that efforts to prosecute Julian Assange aren’t drawing more of an outcry about the First Amendment.
Carl Court / AFP-Getty Images
If you think prosecuting journalists is the province solely of the sort of authoritarian governments in the developing world and the former communist bloc, think again. In the wake of WikiLeaks’s late-November dump of thousands of diplomatic cables, American provocateurs are urging the prosecution of the site’s founder, Julian Assange, and others who were involved in bringing the cables to the public’s attention. Of course, the alleged leaker, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, will face prosecution for giving away state secrets. Reporters and publishers who receive material from a government leaker, however, are typically considered protected from prosecution under the First Amendment.
But conservatives are calling for Assange’s head, in some cases literally. Sarah Palin urged that Assange be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders,” and The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol wants the U.S. to “use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators.” And many are also inclined to prosecute the newspapers that worked with Assange. Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey argue for using the Espionage Act of 1917—which has never been used against a publisher before—to prosecute Assange and have suggested that The New York Times, which published material from WikiLeaks, could potentially be prosecuted as well. The Department of Justice announced that it is investigating whether Assange will be charged.
Some would take issue with that. WikiLeaks did, in fact, offer the State Department an opportunity to request that sensitive information be withheld. But pointing to WikiLeaks as a paradigm of a free press at work is not a position many journalists want to find themselves in. “From a legal perspective, the media may not want this to be the test case,” says Dan Abrams, NBC’s legal analyst and the founder of the Mediaite blog. “This example is almost a classic law school worst-case scenario for testing the bounds of the First Amendment. [Journalists] think it’s within his rights to do have done it, but they think he ought not to have done it. That’s the fundamental tension in the way the media’s covering the story, and the tepid defenses.”
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Why Journalists Aren't Defending Julian Assange - Newsweek
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