Tag: Journalism

Gonna Leave a Mark

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When the Columbia Journalism Review writes an article about your paper, it can frequently be uncomfortable.

When the CJR title is, The Post’s Masthead Will Have to Accept That It Is Not God, you know it is going to be an unpleasant read for the WaPo editorial staff.

The problem here is not one of technology. It is one of politics. The attempt of prestige newspapers like the Post to cast themselves as perfect sentinels of objectivity standing outside the tawdry world of political judgment is, as honest journalists have long realized, absurd. And impossible. The Post’s current social media policy forbids posting anything “that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism.” 

Consider the assumptions inherent in such a standard. It posits, first, the existence of someone capable of telling hundreds of journalists with hundreds of different sets of life experiences covering a complex nation of 330 million citizens what “objectively” is political or racial bias. (Maybe God is up to that job, but Marty Baron is not.) We see in practice that what is ruled to violate this standard is a reporter noting a history of sexual assault in a recently deceased celebrity, or a reporter saying that the Tea Party was motivated by racism. Are these observations “objectively” evidence of some sort of “bias?” No. They are, instead, evidence that it is a fool’s errand for the management of the Post to act as though they alone have insight into objective truth.

Oh, snap!

They Are Completely Losing Their Sh%$

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo completely lost his sh%$ with NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly.
I’m beginning to think that Trump’s minions are coming to realize that they are going down with the ship:

In his brief interview Friday with NPR host Mary Louise Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talked about a couple of pressing issues. On the State Department’s inexcusable failure to stand up for ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch — victim of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s Ukraine pressure campaign — Pompeo told Kelly, “I’ve defended every single person on this team.”

On Iran, Pompeo said, “This is a regime that has been working to develop its nuclear program for years and years and years. And the nuclear deal guaranteed them a pathway to having a nuclear program.”

The most telling part of the interview, however, was nonverbal: “Immediately after the questions on Ukraine, the interview concluded. Pompeo stood, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for several seconds before leaving the room,” notes the NPR account of the interview.

The secretary of state, a man entrusted with spreading and maintaining the good will of the United States throughout the world, is now on record as menacing an NPR co-host of “All Things Considered.”

Then the proceedings moved to insults. An aide invited Kelly into Pompeo’s private living room at the State Department. “Inside the room, Pompeo shouted his displeasure at being questioned about Ukraine. He used repeated expletives, according to Kelly, and asked, ‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?’ He then said, ‘People will hear about this.’”

Kelly provided a more thorough account in a chat with colleague Ari Shapiro:

Moments later the same staffer who had stopped the interview reappeared, asked me to come with her, just me — no recorder, though she did not say we were off the record, nor would I have agreed. I was taken to the secretary’s private living room, where he was waiting and where he shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself had lasted. He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine. He asked ‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?’ He used the ‘f’ word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring out a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine, he put the map away. He said, ‘People will hear about this.’

I’m beginning to think that Donald Trump’s state of the Union is going to resemble Captain Queeg’s meltdown in The Caine Mutiny.

The Republicans, of course, will ignore this, and pretend that everything is normal, just like they are pretending that Pompeo’s meltdown is somehow the fault of a biased media.

It’s Called Shoe Leather Journalism

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It turned out that they were dealing with a community that was hard to reach and dubious of journalists, but instead of throwing up their hands in despair, their team rolled up their sleeves, went to work, and listened to potential sources.

This is an anathema to journalists who dream of meeting “Deep Throat” in a parking garage, or who want make stories out of trial balloons from politicians, but they got their story, and the abuse stopped:

In August, we spent an evening hand-addressing more than 200 letters, mostly to residents of Memphis, Tennessee. The city is the second-poorest large metropolitan area in the country, with nearly 1 in 4 residents living below the poverty line. About half of the letter recipients had been sued by a private-equity backed doctors group because of unpaid medical bills. The other half had been sued by a separate company.

Our team, led by reporter Wendi C. Thomas of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, was investigating the way large institutions profit off people who are poor in Memphis. She had already reported that Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, the area’s largest hospital system, had aggressively sued poor people — and the hospital quickly suspended the practice.

Several other companies also were filing lawsuits against people unable to pay their bills. Court records showed us who these people were, but we didn’t know what these debts meant for their lives. We knew letter-writing alone wouldn’t be enough to connect with people, but it was a start.

After we put our letters in the mail, we continued to try to reach people who had been sued by posting flyers in neighborhoods, making dozens of calls (and getting hung up on plenty of times) and speaking to community leaders.

We understood, through research, that many journalists have historically covered these communities in extractive and self-serving ways, partly because of resource constraints and partly because many aren’t from the communities they cover. Our partners launched MLK50 to break patterns like these. We hoped deliberate engagement would result in real change for the people we reached.

It worked. Even before our story on the doctors group was published with MLK50, the company said it, too, would stop suing its patients.

………

Lessons

  1. You can still do engagement reporting on a topic people don’t like to talk about. But don’t underestimate the amount of work it takes to do it right.
    ………
     
  2. Be specific about who you’re trying to reach. Don’t expect to reach everyone. They don’t owe you anything.
    ………
     
  3. Be specific about who you’re trying to reach. Don’t expect to reach everyone. They don’t owe you anything.
    ………

Read the whole thing.

It’s not just a demonstration of good journalism, it’s an indictment of how much of journalism is practiced today.

Not the Source I Expect for Hard Investigative Journalism

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The Hollywood Reporter has done a deep dive on the 2014 Sony Hack and finds convincing evidence that it was not the DPRK that hacked the studio:++

The massive cyberattack just before Thanksgiving 2014 crippled a studio, embarrassed executives and reshaped Hollywood. The FBI blamed a North Korea scheme to retaliate for the comedy ‘The Interview,’ but many whose lives were upended have doubts. Says Seth Rogen: “The fact that [co-director Evan Goldberg and I] were never really specifically targeted always raised suspicions in my head.”

On Jan. 23, 2015, a manager at Sony Pictures Entertainment shot off an email to a group of 12 in the studio’s distribution department that offered intel about an upcoming film from rival Disney. “Midwest exhibitors went into McFARLAND USA expecting a boring track & field movie but came away pleasantly surprised,” the manager noted about the sports drama that had been screened the day before. It was a mundane missive: a Hollywood executive sizing up the competition.

What is extraordinary about the email is what sources say it reveals about the 2014 Sony Pictures hack — and the official FBI narrative that pins it on North Korea. The email was drafted nearly nine weeks after the now infamous cyberattack ostensibly had been contained. It was passed along to a U.S. cyber researcher in February 2015 by a Ukrainian hacker as alleged proof that his Russian associate had breached Sony and could still do so at will. Despite FBI director James Comey’s “very high confidence” that Kim Jong Un was to blame, the Ukrainian source was maintaining that hackers were still accessing Sony’s system — and they weren’t North Korean.

Exactly five years have passed since the Sony hack, a seismic event that announced itself just before the Thanksgiving holiday on Nov. 24, 2014, when a menacing skeleton simultaneously popped up on thousands of Sony computer screens with the message: “We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets.”

That was followed by 22 days of massive data dumps that exposed embarrassing executive email exchanges (like one between then-co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin in which he refers to Angelina Jolie as “a minimally talented spoiled brat”), trade secrets (including overtures from Marvel to bring Sony-owned Spider-Man into its universe) and five upcoming full-length films (such as Brad Pitt’s Fury). The breach, which former National Intelligence director James Clapper dubbed “the most serious cyberattack ever made against U.S. interests,” rocked the industry and forever altered how studios think about cybersecurity and the global impact of their content. In the aftermath, nearly all of Sony’s top management was swept out.

Although the FBI’s North Korea attribution was swift (it took just 25 days) and has never wavered, many of those impacted still harbor questions about what exactly happened when a previously unknown hacker group named Guardians of Peace decimated Sony’s computer infrastructure and brought one of the six major studios to its knees. THR spoke to more than two dozen insiders and executives who worked at Sony at the time, including some who still do, and more than half say they harbor doubts about the FBI’s official narrative, which maintains that the hack was a response from North Korea because leader Kim Jong Un objected to his depiction in Seth Rogen’s comedy The Interview.

………

Although the disgruntled-staffer angle generated headlines back in 2014, less explored is the prospect of someone using the hack as a weapon to manipulate the Sony share price. A number of investors sold large chunks of stock in 2014 between the supposed late September breach and the day the world learned of the attack on Nov. 24. There was also one spike in short-selling activity in the weeks leading up to Nov. 24. It is unclear if the SEC ever looked into Sony shortings or sell-offs given that SEC investigations are confidential unless it files an action in court.

This is not a smoking gun that the FBI was wrong, but it certainly raises significant doubts.

Also, it would not be the first time that the FBI ssemed more concerned with closing the case than it did with catching the actual malefactor.

The Best Correction this Side of the Guardian

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The British newspaper The Guardian is known for many things, including its “Corrections and Clarifications” page.

It was one of the first such pages, and given the relatively high number of typographic errors, there is a joke that at some point The Guardian will misspell its masthead as The Grauniad,

Well, now GQ has one for the ages.

They confused an IED with an IUD.

— Jake Maccoby (@jdmaccoby) November 22, 2019

It’s a fail, but it’s an EPIC fail.

Not a Single Occurrence of the Word “Genocide”

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The New York Times has a blockbuster using leaked documents showing that China is using mass detentions in an attempt to eradicate the culture of its citizens in western China, most notably the Uighurs. (Long read)

Acting on this scale, there are somewhere around a million people in detention, one can only conclude that that this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate the ethnic character of the population that they are likening to a disease.

Why not a single quote from someone who would describe it as a “genocide”?

The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

………

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:  

  • President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

 ………

  • The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.

    The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

………

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

………

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

I would note that the CCP already has a policy of aggressive immigration of Han Chinese into non-Han regions, so this is actually stage 2 of a policy that fits the UN definition of Genocide.

At the very least, the reporters could have brought in an export to bring up the genocidal aspects of what Beijing is doing.

It’s an Old Story

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Journalists get a list of police officers who have been convicted of serious crimes, the state Attorney General threatens jail for possession of the list, and so the journalists publish the list online in a searchable format:

The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who’ve been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.

This collaboration of multiple newsrooms and journalism advocates began with an unforced error by a state agency. Taking advantage of a new state law allowing the public to access police misconduct records, journalists asked the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for relevant documents. The agency handed over a list of 12,000 former and current officers — a list that apparently was never supposed to be made public.

The state’s Attorney General claimed the journalists had broken the law simply by possessing a document the Commission never should have given them. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but AG Xavier Becerra continued to make this claim, as though it were possible to codify something just by saying it out loud often enough.

I can see why AG Becerra wants this list buried. There’s nothing on it that makes cops or their oversight (which includes Becerra) look good. While the 12,000 officers in the database are a small percentage of the total number of California law enforcement officers employed over the past ten years, this small portion includes a number of cops who were never fired from their agencies despite committing criminal acts that would have put regular people out of a job.

Good.

Whistleblower Details Emerge

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We now know that the person who filed the report about Trump’s shakedown of the Ukrainian President was CIA agent who was assigned to the White House.

Given that Christine Blasey Ford had to go into hiding with her family because of death threats, I am not particularly sanguine with the New York Times revealing so much information about them.

It is reasonable for the Times to get this information, but I think that publishing in a story that is basically a time line of events was not necessary, and will likely face threats and intimidation as a result.

The White House learned that a C.I.A. officer had lodged allegations against President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine even as the officer’s whistle-blower complaint was moving through a process meant to protect him against reprisals, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The officer first shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the C.I.A.’s top lawyer through an anonymous process, some of the people said. She shared the officer’s concerns with White House and Justice Department officials, following policy. Around the same time, he also separately filed the whistle-blower complaint.

The revelations provide new insight about how the officer’s allegations moved through the bureaucracy of government. The Trump administration’s handling of the explosive accusations is certain to be scrutinized in the coming days and weeks, particularly by lawmakers weighing the impeachment of the president.

Lawyers for the whistle-blower refused to confirm that he worked for the C.I.A. and said that publishing information about him was dangerous.

“Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistle-blower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, his lead counsel. “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”

I believe that the Times published this (and other) information in this article because they believed that subjecting whoever this is to harassment was somehow a way of showing their “fair and balanced” bonafides.

There was no need to do this, because, as is stated in the article, “Multiple people had raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s call,” which should serve as an indicator of reliability.

The rest of the article is largely a time line, but it is a useful timeline.

You Have No Right to Know if the Government Wants to Murder You

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This is literally straight out of Kafka’s novel The Trial, where the protagonist is sentenced to death by an unspecified court for an unspecified crime:

A U.S. judge Tuesday dismissed an American journalist’s lawsuit challenging his alleged placement on a “kill list” by U.S. authorities in Syria, after the Trump administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to withhold sensitive national security information.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of Washington, D.C., last year had opened the way for Bilal Abdul Kareem, a freelance journalist who grew up in New York, to seek answers in his civil case from the government and to try to clear his name after what he claims were five near-misses by U.S. airstrikes in Syria.

Collyer in June 2018 ruled that Abdul Kareem, who said he was mistaken for a militant because of his frequent contact with militants linked to al-Qaeda, was exercising his constitutional right to due process in court.

But after talks between Abdul Kareem’s lawyers and U.S. authorities broke down, the government tapped the rarely invoked state secrets authority, saying Abdul Kareem sought information revealing “the existence and operational details of alleged military and intelligence activities directed at combating the terrorist threat to the United States.”

In a 14-page opinion, Collyer said she was bound to agree, saying the government’s right to withhold information in such instances is “absolute.” 

First, the invocation of the state secrets privilege is not that uncommon, and second, the case that established this absolute privilege, United States v. Reynolds, the US government lied to the court about the secret nature of the the evidence.

This is yet another fact that makes the case for the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness), which creates the default of public access for all government data.

Journalism Should Not Be All about Journalists

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The fact that conservative activist are looking into journalists’ history with an eye toward criticizing them is not the end of the world.

In fact, this sort of activity qualifies as journalism, but the mainstream press has never been sanguine about scrutiny being applied to them, just witness their meltdown over Bernie Sanders fairly anodyne condemnation of the pollution of media by finance and mergers:

Many journalists are very indignant that Trump allies are reportedly combing through social media to identify embarrassing things they may have posted long ago that can be used to discredit them. In this case, I’m afraid, the outrage seems to be missing the point.

What exactly is happening here? According to the New York Times, a “loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House” has “compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements” by lots of people who work at major media outlets. They plan to release these tidbits at politically advantageous times in order to discredit the employees and the media outlets themselves. This is all portrayed in formal and quite ominous language. There is a name for this that political reporters are all familiar with: opposition research.

But there is another name for this that is also accurate: media reporting.

Considering the fact that stupid tweets by New York Times (and Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, etc) journalists and columnists is something that crosses my twitter feed on a daily basis, the freakout over conservatives doing the same is silly.

Personally, I’m thinking that this is more an attempt to distract the press than it is to shame them:  Every time that some public figure criticizes the press, it seems that all other journalistic activity is subsumed in an orgy of defensiveness.

Can We Gofundme This?

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The Youngstown Vindicator will be shutting down at the end of August, making the Ohio town the largest in the US without a newspaper:

It was in the late 1920s that the Ku Klux Klan regularly began gathering outside the home of William F Maag Jr in Youngstown. Maag owned the Vindicator newspaper, which unlike others in this once prosperous part of Ohio, had been willing to criticize the racist Klansmen.

Men on horseback, clad in white robes and hoods, would burn crosses and flaunt rifles and shotguns, in an attempt at intimidation. It didn’t work. The men of the Maag family would stand outside their home, themselves armed, refusing to be cowed, as the Vindicator continued to expose government officials who were part of the Klan.

That defiance set the tone for decades of investigative, combative reporting from the Vindicator. The daily newspaper relentlessly reported on the mafia, the government, big business and even its own advertisers.

But no more. Soon after celebrating 150 years since its first edition came news that was devastating to many in Youngstown and the wider Mahoning valley. The Vindicator was shutting down at the end of August. For good.

The Vindicator’s closure means Youngstown will soon be the largest city in the US without a major newspaper, and is the latest blow to an ailing American news industry. According to the University of North Carolina, more than 2,000 US newspapers have closed since 2004, and at least 1,300 communities have completely lost news coverage in the past 15 years. In July a Pew Research Center study reported that the number of journalists in the US declined 47% between 2008 and 2018.

………

The Vindicator became known for tackling the mafia and corrupt officials. The work of De Souza and other reporters in the late 1980s contributed to almost 70 elected officials, mafia members and businesspeople being convicted of criminal acts.

Despite the quality of the coverage, sales have declined over the past four decades. From selling 100,000 copies in the late 1970s – 160,000 on Sundays – the Vindicator is now down to 25,000 editions daily, and 32,000 on Sunday. The paper has lost money for 20 of the last 22 years, Brown said, with a family fund covering the losses. Brown hoped to ultimately sell the Vindicator, but no buyers were forthcoming. He explored a paywall, but the numbers didn’t work. Neither did making the Vindicator online-only.

Well, this sucks.

Headline of the Day

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Better to Have a Few Rats Than to Be One

—Baltimore Sun Editorial Board

This is in response to Trump’s latest tirade against Elijah Cummings, where he slams the Congressman and his district, basically relegates Baltimore to his list of “sh%$ holes”.

Needless to say, residents of the Charm City, and I consider myself one, though I live in the suburb of Owings Mills, are less than amused at the Donald’s latest tantrum.

On edit.

Nancy Pelosi, Baltimore native and daughter of former mayor Tommy D’Alesandro, is unamused by this as well.

The Columbia Journalism Review States the Obvious

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With every day that passes, the drumbeat of war echoes a little more loudly through our media. Yesterday, officials in Iran said that the country will soon have produced and stockpiled more low-enriched uranium—of the type used in power plants—than it is permitted to possess under the 2015 nuclear deal, which the US ditched last year. In Washington, the Trump administration moved to dispatch 1,000 American troops to the Middle East, adding to the 1,500-strong deployment it sent last month. Tensions between the US and Iran, we are told, are rising.

………

Yesterday, the Trump administration declassified images it says back up its case that Iran was behind the tanker attacks. Many outlets relayed administration claims about the images in headlines; in a tweet, Politico said that, per the Pentagon, “the images provide ironclad evidence Iran was responsible.” The third paragraph of Politico’s linked story, however, notes that “nothing in the photos or accompanying documents reveal evidence of the placement of the magnetic mines on the ship.” Hardly “ironclad,” then. Last night, in an article for Task & Purpose, a military news site, Jeff Schogol argued that “not a single US official has provided a shred of proof linking Iran to the explosive devices found on the merchant ships.” Without air-tight evidence, news outlets really should not air administration claims without a heavy dose of context. “Pompeo/Bolton/Shanahan said” is not enough.

Again, it’s hard to generalize, but US coverage of the latest Iran episode seems to be falling into some old, bad habits. In recent coverage, “the media has generally been better at treating unproven accusations by the Trump administration as just that—accusations, and not facts,” Trita Parsi, a researcher and founder of the National Iranian American Council, told me last night in an email. “Yet, on numerous occasions, there has either been a failure to push back against blatantly false assertions by Trump officials, or Trump accusations have been presented as proven facts.” The problem is especially acute in headlines and tweets, Parsi notes.

I have lived though journalistic fails of this sort my entire life.

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the press gets this right in my lifetime.

Tweet of the Day

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If you gave a billion dollars to the top 10 news companies, the chance of a dime being spent on news would be pretty slim. You might as well give a pound of hamburger to a shark and hope to get meat loaf.

How many billions have passed through their hands in the last decade?

— Steve Yelvington (@yelvington) June 10, 2019

Remember this whenever the big media starts whining about how Google News is so unfair to make money from directing readers to their websites.

These days, these organizations are run by finance types, and finance types don’t care about journalism.

Finance and journalism mix like Ebola and French kissing.

Consider the Source

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Rachel Maddow, who has been banging the, “Julian Assange is a Russian agent,” drum relentlessly for the past 2+ years has realized that her ox is gored as well:

Rachel Maddow has aired a segment condemning the new indictment against Julian Assange for 17 alleged violations of the Espionage Act.

Yes, that Rachel Maddow.

MSNBC’s top host began the segment after it was introduced by Chris Hayes, agreeing with her colleague that it’s surprising that more news outlets aren’t giving this story more “wall to wall” coverage, given its immense significance. She recapped Assange’s various legal struggles up until this point, then accurately described Assange’s new Espionage Act charges for publishing secret documents.

“And these new charges are not about stealing classified information or outsmarting computer systems in order to illegally obtain classified information,” Maddow said. “It’s not about that. These new charges are trying to prosecute Assange for publishing that stolen, secret material which was obtained by somebody else. And that is a whole different kettle of fish then what he was initially charged with.”

“By charging Assange for publishing that stuff that was taken by Manning, by issuing these charges today, the Justice Department has just done something you might have otherwise thought was impossible,” Maddow added after explaining the unprecedented nature of this case. “The Justice Department today, the Trump administration today, just put every journalistic institution in this country on Julian Assange’s side of the ledger. On his side of the fight. Which, I know, is unimaginable. But that is because the government is now trying to assert this brand new right to criminally prosecute people for publishing secret stuff, and newspapers and magazines and investigative journalists and all sorts of different entities publish secret stuff all the time. That is the bread and butter of what we do.”

Publishing information that someone else does not want published is journalism.

Anything else is stenography.

This is Supposed to Have a Chilling Effect

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Julian Assangehas now been charged under the espionage act for publishing information that the government did not want published.

Publishing information that someone does not want published is journalism.  Anything else is stenography:

Julian Assange could face decades in a US prison after being charged with violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks.

Prosecutors announced 17 additional charges against Assange for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Assange, 47, was previously charged with working to hack a Pentagon computer system, in a secret indictment that was unveiled soon after his arrest at Ecuador’s embassy in London last month.

“Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries,” the justice department said in a statement. Officials said the publication of secret files by WikiLeaks was “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.

………

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, labelled the new charges facing Assange as “the evil of lawlessness in its purest form”.

He added: “With the indictment, the ‘leader of the free world’ dismisses the First Amendment – hailed as a model of press freedom around the world – and launches a blatant extraterritorial assault outside its border, attacking basic principles of democracy in Europe and the rest of the world.”

I agree with this characterization.

The new charges against Assange raise profound questions about the freedom of the press under the first amendment of the US constitution. They may also complicate Washington’s attempts to extradite him from London.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange in the US, said in a statement: “These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions taken by the US government.”

The charges were roundly condemned by press freedom advocates. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the charges posed a “dire threat” to journalists publishing classified information in the public interest. The Freedom of the Press Foundation described the prosecution as “terrifying”.

Terrorizing journalists is the goal here.

Don’t Leak to the Intercept

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Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged a former United States intelligence analyst with providing classified information to a reporter, according to unsealed court documents.

Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville was arrested Thursday morning and was expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Nashville. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. The Espionage Act is a World War I-era law that criminalizes the disclosure of potentially damaging national security secrets to someone not authorized to receive them.

One of the interesting things is that over the past few years, all the whistle blowers charged in recent years have been working with The Intercept.

I know that in the Reality Winner case, her jailing was a direct consequence of profoundly incompetent OpSec, and also I know that that the owner of the site, Pierre Omidyar has had close ties to the US state security apparatus for years.

I don’t know whether this is an artifact of either incompetence or deliberate malice, but in either case, if you want to whistle-blow, it’s best to choose some other organization.