Once upon a time the ethical debates around journalism were comparatively simple — beginning with the most basic question of all: Who is a journalist?
Assange’s story is an extraordinary one. He started out as an obscure and anonymous hacker, and became one of the most talked-about people in the world — at once reviled, celebrated and lionized; sought-after, imprisoned, self-exiled and shunned.
He had been catapulted from the obscurity of a life dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America’s military and foreign policy operations — even playing a controversial, some say decisive, role in the 2016 US presidential election.
From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geeky tech conferences he was suddenly America’s public enemy number one. If this wasn’t dramatic enough, in the middle of it all, two women in Sweden came forward with allegations of sex crimes, which he has denied: One accused him of sexual assault and the other of rape. The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as something akin to a James Bond villain.
But — despite the tensions and the shouting matches and the disappearances and the threats and the silences — he briefly helped collaborate with the Guardian and New York Times to produce some rather important reporting.
