“Must” as in it is the only moral course of action? Sure. “Must” as in there is something materially compelling them to do otherwise? Unfortunately, no.
This kind of reporting would be threatened – already is threatened – because of the charges against Assange.
This is intentional.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Does Merrick Garland, the Biden-appointed attorney general, really want his legacy to include a heavy blow to long-established press rights in the United States?
First, let’s deal with the argument so often heard about Assange – that he’s not really a journalist, rather a data-dumping publisher, at best, and therefore what happens to him won’t harm American press rights.
“The question of whether Assange is a journalist is a red herring,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told me in an interview this week.
You don’t have to like him or the way his WikiLeaks published reams of classified information to recognize what Jaffer calls the “profound damage” these charges create.
Years ago, President Obama considered bringing charges under the Espionage Act against Assange for his receiving and publishing huge amounts of classified data about US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, largely obtained from the US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
One infamous revelation: video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Iraq that killed 11 civilians, including two Reuters journalists.
The original article contains 753 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The way Julian Assange is being treated in the US speaks volumes about the state of democracy in the US: people think Trump is a savior and want to see Assange in prison. You should know for yourselves why.
Assange worked for Russia in the end. I’m not sure he started out that way, but he sure ended up that way.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html
