Peter Biesterfeld
Ithaka the Movie (@IthakaMovie). Free Julian Assange advocates with the Shiptons after a screening of Ithaka in Toronto, Ontario.
‘Death spiral’ is an apt description of the status of Canadian establishment journalism today, journalism that misinforms Canadian news consumers about international affairs, coverage that fails to bring reliable insight and understanding of Canada’s true role as a global actor.
KILLING the MESSENGER
“If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.” Julian Assange.
When WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange addressed the 2011 Stop The War Coalition demonstration in London in Trafalgar Square he didn’t hold back in his searing remarks about press collusion in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
“Who are the war criminals?” asked Assange. “It’s not just the leaders, it’s also the media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, what is the average death count of each journalist?”
More than a decade later establishment journalists are equally complicit in promoting the escalation of war in Ukraine.
The most damming evidence of a journalism crisis in the Canadian press is that there is virtually no coverage of the press freedom case of our time.
The persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing inconvenient and unsettling truths about ‘rapacious power’, has received only sparse attention from Canadian newsrooms.
The scant reporting that has appeared exposes Canadian journalists and editors working for the ‘most trusted’ news brands as abysmally informed and holding an unwavering establishment bias towards Assange and WikiLeaks.
After Assange’s preliminary extradition hearings in the fall of 2019, this author submitted an op-ed to a news outlet of note about the paucity of Canadian media coverage. The editor’s suggestion for changes in my copy betrayed her bias as well as her ignorance:
“Assange is not a sympathetic character in many ways,” she wrote in email. “He is facing sexual assault and rape charges (in Sweden). The connections with involvement in Russian interference in the US election and democracy – I think it needs to be addressed in the op-ed. It is certainly a strong possible reason why mainstream news in Canada (and elsewhere) isn’t covering the extradition hearings.”
International human right lawyer Nils Melzer details the lawfare perpetrated by Sweden, and the UK against Assange in his investigative 350-pager, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution (2022):
“By deliberately withholding exculpatory evidence the Swedish authorities not only violated Assange’s procedural rights as set out in the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure but, in conjunction with their aggressive dissemination of the rape allegations, may even have committed the criminal offense of false accusation.”
There never were any rape charges and there never was any evidence that Assange was involved in ‘Russian interference’, the latter an MSM construct debunked by the independent press.
When this author explained this to their editor she replied, “But Assange was never a journalist. He’s a hacker.” Reminding her of the long list of journalism awards won by WikiLeaks and Assange over the years apparently dispelled the editor’s skepticism as my submission was published, though downgraded from op-ed to letter to the editor.
Nils Melzer, when in his capacity as UN rapporteur on torture, was first asked by Assange’s lawyers in 2018 to investigate the publisher’s treatment at the hands of UK authorities. Melzer refused because the official narrative on Assange darkened his opinion about the beleaguered publisher.
“I was still affected by all those headlines in the mainstream media which I had almost unconsciously absorbed over recent years: Assange the cowardly rapist refusing to turn himself in to the Swedish authorities. Assange, the hacker and spy evading justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. Assange the ruthless narcissist, traitor and bastard. And so forth.”
Melzer writes in Trial of Julian Assange:
“Only later did I realize how much my perception had been distorted by prejudice. Like so many, I was convinced that I knew the truth about him, even though I couldn’t quite remember where that knowledge had come from. The official narrative had the desired effect on public opinion – myself included.”
After years of exposure to official narratives and media regurgitations on the Assange-WikiLeaks file Canadian MSM reporters are producing what Chris Hedges calls “death spiral” journalism. None of it has been retracted or corrected even though the public record has shown much of the mainstream coverage to be false, misleading or without evidence.
The late Christie Blatchford’s fact-free smear of Assange presented on April 16, 2019 in the National Post titled, ‘Julian Assange is no journalist, and he’s had more than enough due process’ is still available on the Post’s comment page. Blatchford eerily pronounces over Assange as if ‘from the other side’ quoting a Guardian journalist: “Assange was willing to send death lists to psychopaths.”
The reason for bringing up Blatchford is that three years later Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno appears to have found some inspiration from Blatch, as her colleagues liked to call her, for an equally unhinged opinion piece about Julian Assange.
Headlined, “Julian Assange is no hero for being reckless with data”, DiManno’s opinion piece reads more like slander than journalism: “Witheringly narcissistic…He’s cavalier with people’s lives, has let down friends horribly and repels one-time allies. Self-glorifying, he doesn’t have a moral fibre in his being.”
Reciting the customary Assange smears and parroting state-approved, but entirely false claims, DiManno not only exposes her ignorance about the most consequential press freedom case of our generation, but also lays bare the cluelessness of the Star editorial board. Apparently, no op-ed editor thought to ask, “How do we know this to be true?”
DiManno wrote:
“His recklessness with data that disclosed combat strategy imperilled the lives of thousands of troops and hundreds of vulnerable foreign nationals who risked their lives providing information to the U.S. and its allies … their names never excised from the exposed material”.
Eight years ago the Guardian reported precisely the opposite in coverage of whistleblower then Bradley Manning’s court martial for leaking the Iraq war files to WikiLeaks: “Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.”
Expert witnesses including journalists who worked on WikiLeaks releases testified at Assange’s extradition hearing in the fall of 2020 that in fact Assange was not ‘reckless with data’.
American journalist John Goetz working for Der Spiegel, a media partner for WikiLeaks releases in 2010, testified that WikiLeaks spearheaded a “very rigorous redaction process.” Goetz told the court that Assange was “very concerned with the technical aspect of trying to find the names in this massive collection of documents” so that “we could redact them, so they wouldn’t be published, so they wouldn’t be harmed.”
Balanced Canadian coverage on mainstream news programs of Assange’s extradition hearings was hard to find, what there was included smears, and deviated little from the narratives put forward by the U.S. government’s alphabet soup of state security departments CIA, FBI, DOJ, Sec. State, Homeland Security.
John Pilger says media disinterest in the Assange hearings is global:
“If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive.”
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, with daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, worked on all WikiLeaks releases as a media partner. Maurizi testified at Assange’s hearing that on the Iraq War Logs WikiLeaks redacted more than the U.S. government and held back 15,000 documents to ensure harm-minimization.
After 13 years of investigative work on the Assange case Maurizi compiled the outcome of her access to freedom of information battles in Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies.(2022) – “The most detailed account of Assange’s persecution”.
Maurizi has also been fighting a personal freedom of information war with Sweden, Britain, the U.S. and Australia trying to get to the bottom of why sexual-assault allegations against Assange were stalled at the preliminary stage for so long. Based on investigation files and correspondence between prosecutors in the four countries Maurizi shows in Secret Power that the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Swedish prosecutors colluded to prolong Assange’s persecution and incarceration.
Maurizi’s Secret Power, is an impeccably researched resource that is politically charged with the lawfare of our time which has gone unreported by reporters working in the mainstream. Maurizi doesn’t have much good to say about establishment press coverage of Assange and WikiLeaks.
“The reporters covering Assange’s case were just willing to crib from the authorities’ declarations,” Maurizi told Berlin monthly Exberliner. “No media has tried to access the full set of documents in his regard. This is an unbelievable failure of journalism.”
Uncritical reporting of unproven assertions and regurgitating smears made by official sources about Assange is a common example of journalism fraud that some Canadian journalists are beginning to regret.
On episode #291 of his podcast, Short Cuts, CANADALAND publisher Jesse Brown was debating the Assange case with co-host Jen Gerson. “When I was writing for Macleans as a tech journalist and on my show Search Engine, I called Assange an epic donkey. I called him a fame whore when he was doing that show for Sputnik, Russian state TV. I called him an Albino nomad with bad hygiene. I was right there with Christie Blatchford.”
Gerson lets her bias slip, along with an opaque understanding of the material. “Let’s also acknowledge that he was running a Russian propaganda outlet. That strikes me as more pertinent to the issues at hand today than the personal attacks that he suffered back then.”
Only two clicks on Google show that Assange’s interview program on Russia Today (RT), The World Tomorrow was independently produced and licensed for broadcast by RT.
The closing Shortcuts exchange between Brown and Gerson is a telling teeter totter ride.
Jesse Brown: “So, do we claim him as one of ours and do we stand up for him when he is essentially a political prisoner? They’re going after him for what any kind of mainstream reporter might have done if they had a source like Chelsea Manning. They’re going after him because of the embarrassment that he caused, and as a warning to anybody who might do the same thing. I’m trying to dig myself out of my own sense of regret here. I know there was a campaign to tar him personally, I think it influenced me and it influenced my coverage.”
Jen Gerson: “I think the campaign that focused on his personality was unfair. But as to the question, do we claim him as one of our own is probably the wrong frame. The better thing to do is just say, look they’re trying to extradite him under the espionage act. It’s one thing to say that our duty as journalists is to speak truth to power, that starts to ring hollow if in speaking truth to power, you’re just serving another power. And this is where Assange starts to get really complicated. I’m not talking about the personal attacks, I’m talking about the degree to which he was operating in concert with Russia with the explicit intent to sort of undermine American national security. That goes way beyond what most journalists would be willing to connect themselves with.”
What Assange and other WikiLeaks journalists connected themselves with is an astonishingly perfect record of disclosing truthful information that has made the public aware of how corrupt people in power go about their secret business and why.
With journalists like Gerson and Brown dirtying the waters, who needs propaganda? What Canadian news consumers need more of on the Assange/WikiLeaks file is independent and prominent journalistic voices like Green Party leadership candidate (2020) Dimitri Lascaris: “The case of Julian Assange reminds us of the primordial importance of authentic journalism to the causes of justice and democracy. Julian Assange is being persecuted by the most powerful capitalists and imperialists in the world precisely because he fearlessly exposed their crimes.”
Dispelling propaganda and misinformation about Assange and WikiLeaks is the aim of a 2021 documentary, Ithaka, which screened at Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto on March 24. Directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Julian Shipton, the film “works tirelessly to correct the portrayal of Assange that’s been shaped by mass media,” writes Pat Mullen in a POV Magazine review.
The grueling screening schedule of the documentary and post-film discussions and information sessions with local audiences are essential to the campaign’s success. With 25 showings of Ithaka behind them and 25 to go, John and Gabriel Shipton spoke with Canada Files the day before their HotDocs presentation to discuss how the documentary tour is part of a larger campaign to raise awareness of not only of Assange’s plight but also the imminent threat to public interest journalism. After the UK, France, Germany and Australia the Shiptons are bringing Ithaka to North America, with Toronto the only Canadian stop.
“Last night we had a screening in Massachusetts, 100 plus people, 200 plus people the night before,” says Gabriel. “Seeing the crowds come out now we have a feeling of momentum and seeing a real hunger from people to hear more about this issue and what’s actually at stake in Julian’s case. And I think the recognition of that is growing.”
John Shipton observed that European audiences were most concerned with human rights violations and the lack of due process and lawfare in Assange’s extradition case while Americans are worried Assange’s conviction under the espionage act will mean the end of the first amendment and a loss of the bill of rights.
Asked why Canadians should be concerned about the outcome of Julian Assange’s long-running battle with the US security state, John Shipton said:
“When we were young, the way to get around the world safely was to have a maple leaf sewn on your backpack. Well that’s gone. And that’s just a terrible pity, the quality that we felt about Canada as distinct from the United States. That’s really not good for Canada, just to be a slave to ideas that Washington cooks up during a bad night of indigestion and they send them up to Canada. We can’t defend that.
We defend principally the capacity of families to join together and defend a member, and the capacity of communities and families and a nation to have a decent understanding. And we also understand about Assange that the aggregate intelligence of a nation is a strategic asset for the independence of that nation and to fulfill its desire. I imagine that people are well aware that their understanding of the support, for example, of the truckers and their sensibilities, empathizing with the truckers, and the current inquiry in Canada revealing the distortion of the emergency act to benefit government oppression, that circumstance, I imagine, will bleed into the Assange matter.”
Gabriel Shipton reminds Canadian audiences that
“What’s really at stake is the ability of journalists to report on national security using classified information coming out of the US in Washington. There is also a territorial element to this that any US ally or any country’s journalists can be put in prison indefinitely under unprecedented espionage act prosecution. It really means that no journalist or publisher in Canada is safe from this sort of thing and really the main thing that’s being said about Julian can be applied to anyone all over the world.”
He suggests that touring Ithaka is bringing momentum to the awareness raising mission.
“I think the film is a really good entry point for people who have not really engaged with the facts around Julian’s persecution. Most people don’t really have an understanding of it. You have these journalists who are engaged in and committed to propagating these smears. I think generally most people once they engage with the subject then they see the facts and what’s at stake in the case and then they come to our side. It’s just getting people that critical information. The film and this tour is one way to do that.”
On March 24, 2023, after the post-film Q & A, the HotDocs audience of over a hundred dispersed, while the Shiptons mingled easily with some of the question askers and local Free Assange advocates. Charlotte Sheasby-Coleman, who has been chalking Press Freedom and Free Assange messages on the sidewalks of the CBC and the US consulate for years, reflected on the evening:
“Having invited three friends who were supportive of my Julian advocacy but who knew just the bare bones about the case, their reactions of incredulity on learning more of the facts speak to what an important tool this film is for educating the public and raising awareness – hopefully among more members of the media as well.”
Sheasby-Coleman’s group of Assange supporters is planning to join an upcoming day of global action on April 11th which coincides with the fourth anniversary of Assange’s incarceration in Belmarsh high security prison in London.
LANDMARK JOURNALISM
“WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview
WikiLeaks releases have sourced an abundance of public interest journalism since 2007, most of it is about official lies and the abuses and crime perpetrated by governments, institutions, and international corporations. An example from the CBC archives:
“The same day Canada publicly refused to join the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, a high-ranking Canadian official was secretly promising the Americans clandestine military support for the fiercely controversial operation,” reported Greg Weston in a 2011 CBC story based on diplomatic memos released to the broadcaster by Wikileaks.
Greg Weston’s source was the WikiLeaks library of 251,287 diplomatic cables from 1966 to 2010 leaked to WikiLeaks by Manning. Independent news outlet activismMunich recently posted a string of cables filed under The Public Library of US Diplomacy that shows the extent to which the US and its European allies knew about the potential for conflict in Ukraine more than a decade ago.
George Bush’s ambassador to the Russian Federation, now CIA director, William Burns wrote this prescient summary dated February 1, 2008:
“Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”
In a diplomatic memo (2008 June 9) titled “Volker consults with Canadians on NATO”, Kurt Volker, US ambassador to the UN under Bush and later Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, writes a summary of his visit to Ottawa. Some excerpts:
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Ottawa wants to collaborate with the U.S. in an effort to face the range of Russian ‘challenges’, to make MAP available to Ukraine and Georgia, and to counter German efforts to steer NATO policy in ‘unhelpful’ directions.
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(CDN PM) Harper pressed his Italian, German, French, and British counterparts for the quick extension of MAP (NATO Membership Action Plan) to Ukraine and Georgia, (Acting Foreign and Defense Policy Adviser) Sinclair said. Canada’s bottom-line, she added, is that MAP is “imperative for Ukraine…but Georgia too.”
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In another cable dated June 6, 2008 two German foreign affairs diplomats Norman Walter and Rolf Nikel raise concerns with US counterpart David Merkel “that if MAP were pushed forward too quickly in Ukraine, where public opinion is bitterly divided on the issue of NATO membership, it could prove destabilizing and ‘split’ the country.”
WikiLeaks releases are a treasure trove of primary source material, a public information service that will be mined by reporters and scholars for years to come.
“WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did,” writes John Pilger. “No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and (NSA whistleblower) Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.” — John Pilger: New Cold War & looming threats, Frontline, India (21 December 2018)
DEATH SPIRAL
“Once fact becomes interchangeable with opinion, once truth is irrelevant, once people are told only what they wish to hear, journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.” Chris Hedges.
Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges refers to the “death spiral of American journalism” in his analysis of so-called ‘Russiagate’ reporting, the scandal around alleged Russia and WikiLeaks interference in the 2016 US election with the intent of helping elect Donald Trump.
Hedges makes his foreboding claim based on the Twitter Files, internal documents made public by Twitter CEO Elon Musk after he completed his $44 billion buyout of the social media company in October 2022. Journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss are co-ordinating the releases of document details as a series of Twitter threads.
First debunked by Aaron Mate in 2019, Russiagate has been confirmed to be a ‘titanic fraud’. Even conservative journalist-influencers like Fox News host Tucker Carlson are reporting that Russiagate ‘coverage’ has in no small way contributed to the Russophobic climate that took us to the conflict in Ukraine.
What Taibbi and others have exposed in the Twitter Files so far is an “an outsized role of unaccountable intelligence officials and partisan operatives in influencing what the public is allowed to see and access on social media.”
Taibbi in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on March 9 said:
“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.
What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
To date there has been no hindsight analyses of the Twitter Files in the Canadian press, who continue to rely heavily on Russiagate narratives in much of its foreign affairs reporting and coverage of Julian Assange. In fact news consumers relying on MSM in Canada will be hard-pressed to find mention of the Twitter Files or Russiagate, let alone contrition for ‘four years of reporting salacious, unverified gossip as fact.’
Hedges writes, “Major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious postmortem.”
‘Death spiral’ is an apt description of the status of Canadian establishment journalism today, journalism that misinforms Canadian news consumers about international affairs, coverage that fails to bring reliable insight and understanding of Canada’s true role as a global actor.
John Pilger, reflecting on his own trajectory inside a career that spans half a century, tries to account for the low point in public affairs journalism:
“When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received ‘wisdom’ of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground.” — John Pilger: Real journalists act as agents of people, not power, Daily Star (Bangladesh) (16 January 2019)
World peace is under siege from a belligerent US-aligned ‘collective West’ that includes Canada. Our foreign policy is guided by the same imperative as that of the US: limitless capital growth and globalization. And the Canadian establishment press reports accordingly – through a capitalist-imperialist lens.
I.F. Stone’s principles of anti-war journalism have been abandoned, if they were ever championed, by Canadian journalists. They bear repeating: “To write the truth as I see it; to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of mankind, in the hope of some day bringing about a world in which man will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”
Stone’s prescience of matters in the headlines today is eerie and shows that not much has changed in the struggle between the fourth estate and the rest to serve the public’s right to know the truth about the affairs of state.
Stone writes in 1966: “To suppress the truth in the name of national security is the surest way to undermine what we claim to be preserving. There is a is a Latin legal maxim—justitia fiat, ruat coelum: Let justice be done though the heavens fall. I would paraphrase it for newspapermen and say: Let the truth be told as we see it though officials claim the disclosure would cause the heavens to collapse upon them.”
For a contemporary Canadian echo of how our national security is alleged to be threatened almost 50 years later, look no further than the latest CSIS-led media smear against Chinese-Canadian politicians.
Next in this series about journalism fraud committed by Canadian global affairs and foreign policy reporters is an analysis of how the Canadian establishment press is reporting the CSIS allegations that Chinese-Canadian politicians are directed by China to interfere in Canadian elections.
This is part three of Peter Biesterfeld’s series for The Canada Files: Facts are Subversive, A Case for anti-war and anti-imperialist journalism. It focuses on how Canada’s mainstream media is failing Canadians with its foreign policy coverage.
Haiti, Syria and Beyond: How Canada’s Fourth Estate Fails to Serve the Public’s Right to Know
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 