“The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.” – Julian Assange.
Julian Assange, now 52, landed in Australia last night exiting a plane in Canberra to the cheers of supporters – finally free after 14 years of incarceration, isolation, and persecution.
At about 3am Australia time, his brother Gabriel sent out an email blast to their supporters, celebrating Julian’s “first full night in Australia”.
It’s been a good night for Assange and his family, I thought as I read the email, but, tomorrow, as the fictionalised LBJ, played by Brian Cranston in All The Way, put it; “the sun will come up, and the knives will come out.” Indeed, even now you can see his enemies in the media reaching for their daggers.
I didn’t go looking for such attacks, but in my research for this story it was impossible to avoid them.
Sky News’s Peta Credlin, in an Orwellian denial of the recent polling which showed over 70% of Australians wanted Assange home, described the Assange case as a “niche obsession” – an opinion she confidently said was shared by a “majority of Australians.” One of the things the media lies most about is what the population actually thinks. It’s a (largely effective) strategy for making the progressive majority feel like a bunch of isolated, powerless, individuals.
The BBC, published this piece yesterday, while Assange was still in transit, suggesting, in the headline, that Assange – who has just been released after years in a maximum security prison- might best be thought of as an “attention seeker”. Good or evil, Assange is inarguably a figure of greater substance than such critics. He has changed journalism in a way they have not even attempted.
Genius, they say, hits a target no one else can see.
That’s not to say all criticisms of him are unjustified or unreasonable. Perhaps the most balanced assessments have come from Peter Greste, a Queenslander, like Assange, who spent 13 months in an Egyptian prison because of his work for Al Jazeera.
He has celebrated the news of Assange’s release and return to Australia, suggesting champagne corks be popped, and that – as he knows first hand that “extended confinement with an uncertain future is its own particular kind of excruciating torture.” There’s no question in Greste’s mind about the “a serious chilling effect on public interest journalism” effect that the case has had, as whistleblowers and journalists around the world, must operate under the assumption that they too could be charged with a crime, and extradited to the United States, and convicted there, and sentenced to jail time, if they publish classified information that embarrasses the American government.
But elsewhere in the article he goes on to say:
Journalism comes with the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.
I don’t believe WikiLeaks met that standard; in releasing raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online, it posed enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.
This is not to diminish the importance or value of what WikiLeaks exposed. Australia’s union for journalists, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has rightly described this case as “one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom”.
Another Assange critic that I have a lot of time for is my friend and occasional collaborator Scott Stedman, who I met on a trip to the United States in 2022. Scott does fantastic journalism covering the flows of dark money- especially dark Russian money – into US politics and society.
Like many Democrat leaning Americans, he resented Assange for leaking internal documents from the Democratic National Conventions email server – but not from the Republicans- in the lead up to the 2016 election.
When Scott and I met up in Los Angeles the topic of Assange and Wikileaks came up, and it was clear that as a passionate opponent of Trump, he had taken Wikileaks’s/Assange’s intervention in the election personally.
Scott’s hostility, though, was tempered with admiration when I pointed out that the secure anonymous “drop boxes” which are now a permanent feature of journalism, were the invention of Assange and his colleagues, who span out of the Sydney Indymedia group, moving away from directly producing journalism, and into producing tools to change journalism methodology.
On this note, Scott had independently, without realising it, arrived at the same basic philosophy of journalism as Assange.
His old website’s about section stated:
Investigative reports should always include hard evidence i.e. documents, corporate and bank records, photos, videos, flight logs, etc. Word-of-mouth journalism falls short.
This is pretty much in line with the ethos of the “docs or it didn’t happen” meme, which circulated within the Wikileaks supporter community, as a riff on the “pics or it didn’t happen meme”.
A little down the page Scott Says:
Every investigative report that we produce will include forensic evidence as such that it would be “suitable to courts.” This evidence may include bank records, notes, documents, first-hand testimony, flight logs, corporate filings, pictures, etc. That is Forensic journalism.
Compare that with the language used by Assange in this opinion piece from 2010:
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
Reasonable people may disagree about many things, but the principle that public debate should be informed by evidence is not one of them. If you ask the average journalist, they will surely agree. But very few have done anything to advance journalistic practice in this regard. Indeed my experience has been that they will look for any excuse not to innovate.
This extends to Assange’s supporters in the media, including the “alternative” media, whose vision for change is essentially that it should be them and people like them setting the agenda, not the big bad corporations, or the deep state, or whatever.
Then it would be the right agenda, and everything would be fine. In terms of genuine innovation, they offer nothing. They are on a different team, but they are playing the same sport.
At Stone we have done our best to follow Assange’s example, and change the game.
The reason I was meeting Scott in Los Angeles is that he’s been the star user of the software product my team and I built, the Stone Research Transparency platform. It’s a tool that creates video bibliographies. These are a new kind of video content, created by journalists during the research process – documenting the steps taken, the decisions made, and the evidence encountered. The highlights from these can then be embedded into the article, like so:
This idea, of building transparency into the journalism process, was directly inspired by Assange and Wikileaks. We aimed, as I wrote in 2013 at “fulfilling Julian Assange’s dream that a news archive like Wikileaks could usher in a new age of evidence-based “scientific journalism”. I went on to add:
Previously there was no practical way to deliver the full documents behind a story; the full version of an interview or statement which is quoted in a story, for instance. The constraints of space in the print mediums, and time in the case of broadcast, left no option but for journalists to brutally summarize, inevitably editorializing in the process. The plasticity and interactivity of online news mediums gives us no such excuse, and increasingly, since at least when Gary Webb published a collection of texts, photos, and audio files as supporting material for his “Dark Alliance” series, the best journalists have been backing up their claims with extensive, often leaked, documentary evidence. We seek to systematize and integrate this approach and make it the new rule, rather than the exception as it currently is.
But putting these ideas into practice in a systematic way, with the tools that already existed, proved to be a time consuming and unsatisfying process, and didn’t sufficiently demystify the process and build trust with our readers. So after a few years of trying, the most committed members of the team decided to “pivot” into software production. The result, after years more of effort, is the software I have demonstrated above.
Our key innovation is the use of video as a capture method. This has the advantage of functioning both as a bibliographical record – keeping screenshots of the evidence encountered, and as a methodology section – showing the good faith effort of the journalist to find and relay all the relevant information, not just the bits that suit them. But Stone is not a video tool. It is a trust tool that uses video. In future, we have plans to use cryptography, machine learning and other technologies, all in pursuit of trust and transparency.
Now that Assange is free, it’s time to move the focus away from personalities, and start putting new principles into practice. It won’t be easy, but as Assange’s 14 year ordeal shows us, changing the world never is.
