From Consortium News
In a previous blog post, I warned that the media and political class would continue with their long-running deceptions about Julian Assange now that he has been dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy. They have wasted no time in proving me right.
The first thrust in their campaign of deceit was set out on The Guardian's front page on Friday, April 12, the day after Assange was imprisoned.
There should have been wall-to-wall outrage from public figures in the U.K. at the United States creating a new crime of "doing journalism" and a new means of arrest for those committing this "crime" overseas, what I have termed "media rendition."
Remember that all of the information contained in the U.S. charge sheet against Assange the supposed grounds for his extradition were known to the previous Obama administration as far back as 2010. But President Barack Obama never dared approve the current charges against Assange because legally there was no way to stop them being turned against "respectable" journalists, like those at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian.
This was the same Obama administration that had the worst record on prosecuting whistleblowers. Obama was no friend to investigative journalism but he understood that it would be unwise to so overtly subvert the notion of a free western press.
That the Trump administration has cast all this aside to get Assange behind bars should have every journalist in the world quaking in their boots, and loudly decrying what the U.S. is seeking to do.
And yet the reaction has been either quiet acceptance of the U.S. extradition request as a simple law enforcement measure or gentle mockery of Assange that the scruffy outlaw dragged from the embassy was looking even scruffier after seven years of extreme house arrest and "arbitrary detention." What a laugh!
Narrative Collusion
Now we can see how the media is going to collude in a narrative crafted by the political class to legitimize what the Trump administration is doing.
Rather than focus on the gross violation of Assange's fundamental human rights, the wider assault on press freedoms and the attack on Americans' First Amendment Rights, U.K. politicians are "debating" whether the U.S. extradition claim on Assange should take priority over earlier Swedish extradition proceedings for a sexual-assault investigation that was publicly dropped back in 2017.
In other words, the public conversation in the U.K., sympathetically reported by The Guardian, supposedly Britain's only major liberal news outlet, is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange.
Here's the first paragraph of The Guardian's front-page article:
"Political pressure is mounting on [Home Secretary] Sajid Javid to prioritise action that would allow Julian Assange to be extradited to Sweden, amid concerns that US charges relating to Wikileaks' activities risked overshadowing longstanding allegations of rape."
So, the concern is not that Assange is facing rendition to the U.S. It is that the U.S. claim might "overshadow" an outstanding legal case in Sweden.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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