ASSANGE IS FINALLY FREE

Kit Klarenberg on Julian's trials and work and Trish on other brave journos she has known

This is a repost due to a technical error.

Updated Video: Julian Assange arrives home:

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Overnight on Monday, news broke that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was on a flight to freedom through a plea deal — ending six grim years in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison. With a stop on a remote American territory to ratify the agreement for time served, he’s off again to reunite with his wife and children in Australia. 

In an age where journalist has become a dirty word and given the state of legacy media, rightly so — the release from prison of Assange makes me think back to what it used to mean for those of us who call it our profession. I still get choked up when I think of Woodward and Bernstein who inspired me to become an investigative reporter before their fall from grace, driven by Trump hatred.

My chest puffs up with pride viewing the movie Spotlight, a true story about the kind of dedicated and fearless journalism we used to do at The Fifth Estate. The film reflects the commitment of the best journalists — who care only for truth-telling despite the personal cost.

I think of my former work-friend David Blundy who was killed while covering the conflict in El Salvador. This from the New York Times in 1989:

A British journalist, David Blundy, was killed today by a sniper's bullet while covering the military offensive here, colleagues said.

Mr. Blundy was hit while walking down a street with other reporters covering the rebel offensive in a San Salvador suburb, said his editor at The Sunday Correspondent in London, Peter Cole.

Mr. Blundy, 44 years old, died in a hospital after surgery. His editor said he never regained consciousness.

And this:

Mr. Blundy's death brought to 31 the number of Salvadoran and foreign journalists killed during the 10-year civil war in El Salvador, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The last three fatalities occurred during the presidential elections in March.

A kind and brave human who never said no to a guest-booking producer from the CBC

.Another hero and acquaintance of mine was the brilliant American reporter, Nate Thayer who got the scoop of the decade but died poor, sick and alone — the result of multiple malaria bouts and a serious drinking problem — occupational hazards for journalists like Nate.

I’ll never forget the afternoon his producer called me from Bangkok, whispering that Nate had just located and interviewed Pol Pot, the monstrous butcher of millions of Cambodians in a country held hostage by his communist Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was in hiding. It took Nate a decade of building sources and hanging out in the dangerous jungle to find him and get this story.

Behind the swashbuckling, cowboy image, was "this very inquisitive mind," Chanda says. And even in those earliest years, he says, it was clear how "completely committed" Thayer was to finding Pol Pot, who led the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's brutal Communist regime from 1975 to 1979.

In the name of establishing an agrarian utopia, Pol Pot's genocidal revolution sent between 1 to 3 million Cambodians to their deaths in the notorious "killing fields" — one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

Thayer shrewdly assessed the struggle within the Khmer Rouge, Chanda says, "who's gunning for whom, and how he could perhaps use this ... in getting access to the area."

Dogged persistence pays off

After years of reporting and cultivating sources, Thayer's big break came in 1997, when an internal Khmer Rouge power struggle ended in Pol Pot being ousted and put on a show trial.

Thayer and Asiaworks Television cameraman David McKaige were allowed into the Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold of Anlong Veng near the Thai border to cover the spectacle.

A hard day at work, for Nate — below

.In the end his footage was licensed to ABC - who hijacked his work and treated him terribly.

The heralded scoop won Thayer a plethora of awards. It also led to a long and bitter feud with ABC journalist Ted Koppel and the show Nightline, whom he claimed violated the terms of their agreement to use his material. As a result, Thayer declined a prestigious Peabody Award.

Nate never recovered from the betrayal and the various ailments he developed after years of slogging through disease-ridden Asian forests. I visited him once at the decaying, Maryland marshland mansion he couldn’t really afford, traveling there with his close friend and producer. She was, for years, also my bestie. As young journos we had worked a brutal morning shift together at CTV’s Canada AM.

In the end, it was Nate who confirmed to the world, Pol Pot’s death.

Nate lost the mansion and died last year in Falmouth, Massachusetts at the age of 62. His brother found him. Nate was alone when the end came, two days earlier.

Years after his scoop, this legend was asked to write a piece for a major American journalistic magazine — without remuneration. He called me in an absolute uproar that the editor had suggested he should be happy to appear on their digital platform without payment.

This insult now plagues many great indy journalists. Chris Cuomo, meanwhile made millions on CNN telling the kind of lies that real reporters were debunking without credit or fanfare.

There have been and still are great journalists, who risk much to tell the truth. Kit Klarenberg is one and he joins me to talk about Julian Assange — who in our digital age is as brave a reporter as has ever been.

At the beginning of the interview I suggest, wrongly I think now, that the plea deal might imperial journalism more generally, but experts are saying it won’t.

Bruce Afran, a U.S. constitutional lawyer, told Consortium News that a plea deal does not create a legal precedent. Therefore, Assange’s deal would not jeopardize journalists in the future of being prosecuted for accepting and publishing classified information from a source because of Assange’s agreeing to such a charge.

As I say on the podcast frequently, great journalism is a learned skill - not necessarily taught but the profession of a certain personality type that seeks freedom and truth at any cost. Julian is one of those.

Stay critical.

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