Did you miss the part where he hosted a show on RUSSIA TIMES (Russia's main propaganda network)?
Quote from hereIn reality, Assange’s 2012 show “The World Tomorrow” was produced separately from RT and only picked up for airing by that network, in exactly the same way as Larry King’s show has been picked up and aired by RT. Nobody who isn’t wearing a tinfoil pussyhat believes that Larry King is a Russian agent, and indeed King is adamant and vocal about the fact that he doesn’t work for RT and takes no instruction from them.
USA's corporate media networks also frequently push propaganda. Does that mean everything they air is propaganda and everyone who hosts a segment on one of them is a U.S. propaganda agent?
Where he condemned the Panama Papers leak as "Putin Bashing"?
Looked this up. Are you referring to
this interview? He didn't condemn the Panama Papers. He complemented the work. His criticism was of their up-front declaration that they would never publish the majority of the documents they had obtained.
Al Jazeera: The head of the ICIJ - coincidentally is another Australian - Gerard Ryle. I think it's fair to say you're not on great terms. He said that the ICIJ has no plans to release the full data set. He said: "We're not WikiLeaks. We're trying to show that journalism can be done responsibly."
Julian Assange: Yeah that's a concern. We're very pleased about the work that SZ (Suddeutsche Zeitung) - did in the beginning in developing that source. We think that's really good work. The work of the source of course is the most impressive and then pulling together that collaboration is also impressive work.
Saying that you're going to censor and not release a lot of the material, in fact what must be 99 percent of the material, that's a big problem. It's fine to have some kind of staggered release because you want to balance the supply and demand curve. But what I want to hear is that there is a path, a transparent path to publishing the vast majority of that data set because that's what's interesting from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective.
One of the fundamental missed lessons of the WikiLeaks experience is about how to deal with scale. OK, one part of dealing with scale is stitch together a big international collaboration, get more bodies, more eyeballs on the material. The other way to deal with scale is that scale is inherent in the material. When you've got millions of documents, you need to make millions of documents available, citable so it's not just a few hundred journalists, it's all the lawyers in the world, it's all the police in the world.
Al Jazeera: As someone who pretty much wrote the book on multi-media outlet collaborations - you knew that this stuff was coming. When you saw the first wave, the first two or three days of reporting, what stood out for you and what did you not see that you thought you would in the reporting?
Julian Assange: Well we've been covering offshore sector for a long time since 2007. In fact, WikiLeaks has used the offshore sector for protection from banking blockades so we even had to research it for our own purposes. But in terms of the initial angling of the story, that can be a bit strange. There was clearly a conscious effort to go with the Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing etc. I didn't think that was necessary for that story, it's not as if the blowback from the US DoJ or the US State Department needs that kind of political protection but for some reason some papers, like The Guardian, thought that that was necessary.
Your focus on him using the words "Putin bashing" is extremely narrowly cherry-picked, because if you look at the whole of the comment (bolded by me), it's not like his comments are anything especially focused on Putin or Russia. And he's only being asked to comment on what his thoughts were regarding the first 2 to 3 days of reporting.
Or the part where his escape plan from Equador was a permanent diplomatic post in Russia.
So are you going to say that Snowden is a Russian agent next?
Did you miss the fact that Wikileaks just coincidentally released new "damning" information on Clinton every single time she was polling well, and never published a thing on Trump?
Why would they? Trump's an open book. There's nothing to leak. His entire life is an unmitigated disaster of corruption and debauchery that he doesn't make serious or competent efforts to hide or deny. The mainstream media reported on it non-stop for the entire election season, and the free publicity is a large part of what handed him that election.
"Why would he support Trump when he's an anti-authoritarian?" has a simple question - HE IS NOT AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN AT ALL AND IS LYING TO YOU.
*eyes roll out of skull and on down the street*
Nevermind that he's done more damage to the world's most powerful unaccountable authoritarian structures than any other single person in decades, and is so hated by them for it that politicians and corporate pundits have repeatedly made public calls for him to be black-bagged or assassinated, sentiments I've never seen in my lifetime weighed against any other journalist, and had been pulling international strings to bury him for years before 2016.
Not only has Wikileaks published plenty of info damaging to Russia, but the
Courage Foundation, a fundraising trust founded by Wikileaks for the defense of whistleblowers and journalists, has
Pussy Riot on their advisory board.
Some of the most high profile Russian dissidents of the past 20 years, one of whom Putin has
literally tried to have assassinated.