The day Julian Assange threatened to sue The Guardian over the US embassy cables story | Media. The WikiLeaks US embassy cables revelations caused a world-wide sensation. But the story behind their publication turns out to be just as sensational too. It transpires that the partnership between the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and The Guardian was anything but straightforward. According to a Vanity Fair article by Sarah Ellison, there were rows, legal threats and a series of shocks before the newspaper was able to publish what she calls "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.
" She has reconstructed a blow-by-blow account of the twists and turns of the strained relationship between The Guardian - and other papers, including the New York Times - and Assange. He emerges as an enigmatic, erratic and high-handed individual whose changes of mind and mood bedevilled the process of publishing the documents. Assange is now under police bail in Britain, facing extradition to Sweden for questioning about claims of sexual assault. Assange did not favour redaction. The Man Who Spilled the Secrets | Politics. The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper.
What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.
On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. The Guardian partnership was the first of its kind between a mainstream media organization and WikiLeaks.
Frontline Club. WikiLeaks locked in war of words. Julian Assange, right, arrives at Belmarsh Magistrates Court in London earlier this month with his lawyer Mark Stephens. Picture: AFP Source: The Australian IAN Katz, the deputy editor of The Guardian, says it has been "complicated", with quite a few frictions and an inevitable culture clash. Julian Assange says some aspects of it have been "disgusting" and reek of betrayal. The two men are talking about one of the most important media developments of recent years, the relationship between Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper and Assange's whistleblowing WikiLeaks website. It was The Guardian that convinced Assange to join forces in an old media-new media collaboration to publish its enormous caches of leaked US government cables, and even though the partnership grew to include The New York Times and three other European publications - Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde - the British newspaper has remained its driving force.
Stephens denied any hypocrisy. Should we trust Bill Keller? In the decade-long debate about the future of news and blogging, the defenders of professional journalism always fall back on long-term investigative work for justification. The argument goes as follows. Blogging may be the domain of primary sources and the individuals they used to quote in everyday pieces now have their own blogs. But investigative journalism, working the sources, that's expensive. You need pros to do that work.
This always struck me as naive. And then along comes WikiLeaks to prove that even investigative journalism works differently with the advent of the Internet. The Times has said that they may operate their own leaks site, but for now that seems as pointless as Assange saying he's going to replace the pros with volunteers. But the smear job is not going to work, because the issue is not Julian Assange. All along I've been saying to the pros that what I want to do is work with you, not against you. One more thing.
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