Yes, WikiLeaks Led to the Revolt in Tunisia. Wikileaks: Where Do You Stand? | Overseas Press Club of America. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange In recent weeks, the news has been dominated by the Wikileaks disclosure of classified State Department documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently, in the name of freedom of speech, defenders of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange have been mounting hacking attacks on those trying to disavow him, ranging from Amazon.com and PayPal (for cutting off Wikileaks access) to the Swedish prosecutor who accuses him of rape. Should the OPC's Freedom of the Press Committee be defending Wikileaks and Assange?
We haven't done so, on several grounds. For another, Assange needs no help from us in getting his viewpoint known, since everything he gets his hands on lands on front pages around the world. Finally, we object to those defending him by somehow conflating the Swedish charge of rape with an attempt to silence Wikileaks. But this is not an open-and-shut case, and clearly an issue of moment for practicing journalists.
New York Times Editor Bill Keller Says Julian Assange Was 'Arrogant' and 'Conspiratorial' (Newser) – New York Times editor Bill Keller's lengthy essay on dealing with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange continues to ricochet around the blogosphere, with most of the attention focused on his not-so-flattering assessment of Assange as a person. He describes the WikiLeaker as "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial, and oddly credulous" and says Assange became "transformed by his outlaw celebrity. " The WikiLeaks' honcho went from an unkempt "office geek" type to a "cult figure" with styled hair and a penchant for "fashionably skinny suits and ties," writes Keller.
He also describes the falling-out that occurred between the newspaper and the "conspiratorial" Assange, defends his paper's journalistic motives, suspects "the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown," and, despite the frayed relations, thinks it's "chilling to contemplate" government persecution of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks tweeted that the essay is another "self-serving smear. " Bill Keller vs Wikileaks: Goodnight, Julian Assange, And Bad Luck. I’m loath to write again about Wikileaks, or about its pig-to-man founder, Julian Assange. Not because I’ve run out of things to say, but because the response is so predictable when I do. Within minutes, the Assange fanboys – the Wikiliebers, if you like – will swarm into the comments, accusing me of unfairly slandering their hero. “He’s sticking it to The Man!” They’ll cry, “he’s disrupting the mainstream media!” They’ll holler, “it was a honeytrap!”
No forest of Vanity Fair and New Yorker profiles or unrelated criminal allegations or hubristic statements about having “two wars I have to end” will convince the Wikiliebers of the truth: that Assange is an arrogant computer genius who began Wikileaks with the best of intentions but has since lost sight of his principles in the relentless pursuit of personal celebrity. But if I take some flak for my relatively inconsequential badgering of Assange, I can only imagine how much Bill Keller must be getting right now. Not so, says the Times. Bill Keller: Colluding With WikiLeaks Was Fun at First, Then Annoying. The Times just posted a lengthy article by executive editor Bill Keller, which tells the story of last year's WikiLeaks dumps through the eyes of the Gray Lady. The piece will appear in this coming Times Magazine, but it's really worth reading now.
The whole thing is interesting, from its depictions of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange (he went from a being a disheveled "bag lady" or "derelict" who smelled "as if he hadn't bathed for days" to a stylish "cult figure" who was "evidently a magnet for women") to its lengthy explanation and eloquent defense of the Times' motives. It walks readers through how, and why, the paper chose to highlight the narratives it did. It reveals how polite were the interactions between the paper and the government, despite all the controversy — and points out the difference between the Obama administration in this regard and the Bush one. And it lays out in detail how the paper's relationship with Assange went "from wary to hostile.
" Reporters got hacked? The Times's Dealings With Julian Assange. WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange. The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house.
Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. “That’s for you,” she said.