The Outrage and the Silence
The media feasts on every twist and turn of Alexei Navalny’s brief disappearance, while barely even mentioning the latest update in Julian Assange’s extradition appeal process
The year ended with newsworthy developments concerning two prominent figures.
The fate of one of these individuals was closely followed and dissected by the corporate media, while the wellbeing of the other was almost completely ignored. The disparity in coverage wasn’t an accident.
The former is the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
Early in December, the opposition leader vanished before turning up in a Siberian prison several weeks later. Because the hell he’s experienced has come at the hands of an official State Department adversary, the American media seized on the opportunity to document his continued imprisonment and covered the two-week drama every step of the way.
Roughly a week following Navalny’s disappearance, it was announced that Julian Assange’s last grasp for freedom had been scheduled to take place in a British courtroom for later next month. This news went largely unreported, with nearly all mainstream outlets ignoring the Wikileaks founder, as they’ve grown so accustomed to doing.
The intent behind the difference in coverage is as clear as day and showcases how the corporate media manufactures indignation for some stories, but deliberately ignores others. How foreign leaders on America’s naughty list target dissidents will always make headlines. If only the same standard was ever applied to how the US government targets its own.
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Since the early 2000s, Alexei Navalny has worked to expose corruption at the highest levels of the Russian government. He’s organized protests and has popped in and out of Russia’s prison system for years, serving numerous short stints for coordinating and participating in demonstrations against the Kremlin.
Less than two months following his entry into the 2018 presidential race, a Russian district court revived an old fraud charge against Navalny in February 2017. Later that year, he was officially barred from moving forward with his candidacy as a result of the retrial, with the country’s Central Election Commission rejecting Navalny’s registration the day after he submitted it, citing the conviction.
Last August, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Early last month, Navalny missed several court hearings, with his lawyers reporting that they hadn’t heard from him in days and were unable to make contact with him. On Christmas Day, Navalny turned up in a penal colony in Siberia.
Because the Kremlin targeting a political inconvenience intersects with narratives the Western establishment benefits from emphasizing, the media tracked the story for weeks, reporting on each and every development as it unfolded.
Countless individuals on the left have praised Navalny, despite, among other things, his racist comparison of Muslim immigrants to cockroaches, his alignment with right-wing nationalists, and a level of public support in Russia that barely registered in national polls. Many in the US opted to overlook Navalny’s grotesque views because he hated Putin and to these individuals that was good enough.
For the purposes of this article, what is most important about Navalny is how he’s been used by the US media and political class, and how this laser focus on his circumstances contrasts with how the West turns a blind eye to someone like Assange. This is how the media treats stories the country’s power centers want people to hear. These same organizations are equally as accommodating when it comes to the things Washington would rather Americans forget about.
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Just before Christmas, Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, confirmed that the Wikileaks founder will appear at the Royal Courts of Justice on February 20-21. Having already exhausted several other appeals, the two High Court judges he’s set to face on these dates may very well be his last shot at avoiding extradition to the US.
Assange has been indicted on 17 charges under the Espionage Act and faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
The “espionage” committed by Assange – who was born in Australia and has never lived in the US, nor sworn any kind of political or legal allegiance to the American government – was actually just journalism.
In 2010, the organization published a classified US military video entitled Collateral Murder, which depicted US forces indiscriminately killing more than a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Alongside three of its media partners – The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel – it published the Afghan War Logs, thousands of classified military documents covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009, which offered a picture of the war far different from the rosier one offered publicly by US officials. A few months later, Wikileaks published an additional 391,832 classified documents about the war in Iraq. The following year, The New York Times published the Guantanamo Bay files, a trove of 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers written between 2002 and 2009, one for all but 20 of the military base’s prisoners, which were first obtained by Wikileaks. The documents detailed guidelines for interrogating prisoners as well as justification for keeping certain inmates at the base, while releasing others.
Scores of other significant scoops would be published in the years that followed.
These were all things that the world had a right to know, and Julian Assange has collected dozens of journalistic awards and honors over the past decade for his role in bringing these stories to the masses. Assange did what journalists are supposed to do: he held power accountable by exposing the corruption and wrongdoing they’d hoped the public would never see.
Washington’s response was to try to silence Assange forever by painting him as a criminal and holding him up as an example. While the US government’s foreign policy is predicated largely on fighting authoritarianism abroad, its own penalty for journalism that challenges its power is a lifetime behind bars.
If the Biden administration succeeds in its efforts to extradite Assange, the trial that would follow would be little more than a formality, as he would all but certainly be convicted. Because the wildly repressive Espionage Act prohibits defendants from arguing in court why they were justified in publishing certain materials, his fate would be sealed the moment his feet touched American soil.
Following the withdrawal of the publisher’s asylum status by Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno, Assange was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorean embassy by British authorities and promptly charged by the DoJ.
That was in April 2019. Assange has languished in London’s Belmarsh prison – a maximum-security facility holding rapists, serial killers, and terrorists – ever since. It’s been reported that Assange had been observed banging his head against the wall and pacing in his cell until collapsing. The publisher even suffered a stroke during one of his court hearings as a result of the intense stress he’s experienced.
Stella has shared “what Julian hears all day every day,” posting audio recorded on Christmas Day 2021.
The suffering Assange has endured has produced barely a whimper from the American press, with most of the nation’s media personalities willfully ignoring Assange’s continued torture. The corporate press has exercised this same type of indifference since the news of his new hearing date being set broke.
Democracy Now! aired a New Year’s Day special about Assange, airing highlights from the Belmarsh Tribunal, a recent event held in Washington that featured journalists, lawyers, and activists who took turns praising Assange’s work and making their cases for why he should be released. Over these past few weeks, not a single other US news channel has bothered to air anything on Assange.
While there weren’t any op-eds or panel discussions about Assange when UK Home Secretary Priti Patel signed the extradition order to send him to the US in June 2022, most outlets dedicated at least a few moments of airtime to at least acknowledge the news. As this page noted at the time, the purpose behind this shoddy, cursory coverage was just to check a box. Now, these outlets don’t even feel the need to do that and feel comfortable ignoring Assange altogether.
Unsurprisingly, the few mentions in the mainstream press that Assange has received in the past few weeks have been as misleading and distorted as coverage of anything related to Wikileaks generally tends to be.
Reuters was one of the few outlets to report on Assange’s next hearing. The brief news bulletin, which ran on December 19, featured a number of the same cowardly hedges most outlets favor when writing about Assange.
Terrified to actually take a position on the matter, the publication noted that Assange released troves of “confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger.” [emphasis added]
Washington has indeed said this, but the claim has since been proven to be demonstrably false.
The article also writes that “Assange's supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing, and that his prosecution is an assault on journalism and free speech.”
As I’ve previously written, mainstream outlets have been using this spineless rhetoric to describe this case for years. CNN anchor Ana Cabrera deployed it following the June 2022 announcement that Secretary Patel had signed off on the US government’s extradition request. Just after that news broke, Cabrera ended a brief segment on Assange by telling her viewers that “his supporters say the case undermines freedom of the press,” a sneaky copout which allowed her to attribute the claim to others without having to comment on the veracity of the statement herself.
Earlier that day, her colleague Poppy Harlow used the same trick after finishing up a conversation about Ukraine with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the pro-war neocon think tank. Pivoting to a quick hit on the Assange news, Harlow said that Wikileaks called the extradition “a dark day for press freedom” but she too didn’t bother to comment on whether she agreed with the statement.
Over these past few weeks, only one corporate news outlet printed an article on Assange that made any sense. In what should serve as an absolute embarrassment to all of its “left-wing” competitors, that outlet was Fox News.
Instead of needlessly softening or circumventing the truth, the December 20 article meets it head on, writing that the 2010 cables published by Wikileaks detailed “war crimes committed by the U.S. government in the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“The materials also exposed instances of the CIA engaging in torture and rendition,” the article also noted.
“U.S. prosecutors and critics of Assange have argued WikiLeaks' publication of classified material put the lives of U.S. allies at risk, but there is no evidence that publishing the documents put anyone in danger,” Fox continued, putting to paper something most other major publications have gone to great lengths to omit.
Fox News is a dangerous news outlet whose ceaseless propaganda machine has harmed the country for decades. Nevertheless, it was willing to print something other news channels were eager to avoid.
That pretty much sums up the entire scope of the recent coverage of Julian Assange.
The most powerful voices in the country – the individuals who can use their influence and reach to build momentum for a campaign that could free Assange – have chosen to remain silent. The absolute frauds who scream the loudest about the sanctity of the First Amendment and the danger of authoritarian overreach have allowed the most consequential journalist of this generation to spend years in prison for exposing the truth.
Even when the establishment actually pays attention to Assange, the efforts are minimal and do not appear to be designed to yield tangible results. The lawmakers who’ve written letters they know the president and attorney general will never read have also sponsored resolutions they know will never pass. They’ve lent their names to cosmetic measures but rarely, if ever, even mention Assange in public. The five publications that “urged” the Biden administration in November 2022 to drop the charges against Assange have remained just as quiet on his case.
Julian Assange is a journalist being held as a political prisoner for doing his job.
Because protesting Assange’s detention doesn’t serve the corporate media’s interests the way tracking Navalny’s does, the media simply ignores the Wikileaks founder as much as it can.