Media Quotes of the Week: Is Julian Assange really a journalist? to don't take Boris Johnson's column seriously says Telegraph its 'comically polemical'

Alan Rusbridger on CNN on the arrest of Julian Assange: "So is Assange really a journalist? The answer in 2019 is a complicated one. New technologies allow millions of people to commit individual acts of journalism. That may not make them "journalists" in a conventional sense, but it does raise the question of whether these journalistic acts deserve the same sort of protection as those carried out by people who have had more traditional careers in journalism. To my mind, Assange is partly a journalist. Part of what he does has involved the selection, editing, verifying and contextualizing of news material -- just as any journalist would do. But Assange is also a publisher, a political activist, a hacker, an information anarchist, a player. Yes, he believes -- sometimes -- in editing. But he also believes in dumping vast oceans of documents, unedited and unredacted, careless to the consequences. One is journalism, the other isn't."

Seamus Dooley, NUJ assistant general secretary, in a statement:"The NUJ is shocked and concerned by the actions of the authorities in relation to Julian Assange. His lawyer has confirmed he has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request. The UK should not be acting on behalf of the Trump administration in this case. The NUJ recognises the inherent link between and importance of leaked confidential documents and journalism reporting in the public interest. It should be remembered that in April 2010 WikiLeaks released Collateral Murder, a video showing a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack upon individuals in Baghdad, more than 23 people were killed including two Reuters journalists. The manner in which Assange is treated will be of great significance to the practice of journalism."

The Times [£] in a leader: "No one should feel any sympathy for Julian Assange as he swaps the self-imposed captivity of a small room in the Ecuadorean embassy for a prison cell. The Wikileaks founder, who was arrested yesterday when Ecuador revoked his claim for asylum after seven years, was no political prisoner but a fugitive from the Swedish courts, where he was wanted on charges of sexual assault and rape. He took himself to the embassy in London in 2012 only when he had run out of options to avoid extradition. In doing so, he broke British law and denied his two Swedish accusers their right to see him face trial. Nor does Assange deserve sympathy as a self-styled champion of free speech. In its early days, Wikileaks could make some claim to be pursuing legitimate public interest journalism by providing a space for whistleblowers to expose corruption and other wrongdoing. But Assange has since crossed a line, becoming a stooge of oppressive regimes with no interest in press freedom but a strong desire to undermine western democracies, not least when he published material stolen from the Democratic National Committee believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence services during the US presidential election of 2016."

The Guardian in a leader: "The indictment relates to the secret military and diplomatic files provided by Chelsea Manning, the army whistleblower, which unveiled shocking US abuses and shed light on corrupt and repressive governments worldwide. That Ms Manning is once again in jail, for refusing to give evidence to a secret grand jury in a WikiLeaks investigation, is a disgrace. The importance of the material, published by the Guardian, the New York Times and others, was undeniable. But subsequently we and others strongly disagreed with Mr Assange’s decision to bulk-publish unredacted documents...Mr Assange now faces up to a year in prison for skipping bail. He was wrong to do so. He entered the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced allegations of rape and molestation (which he denies), citing fears that Stockholm would hand him to the US. It would be entirely appropriate for Swedish prosecutors to reopen their investigation, as the lawyer representing one of his accusers has requested. None of this alters the dangers of agreeing to his extradition to the US."

The Sunday Times [£] reports: "Labour suspended an official accused of leaking sensitive information to this newspaper just days before it defended the role of whistleblowers following the arrest of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange."

Carole Cadwalladr challenging the tech giants at TED 2019: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands, I don’t think it is. And so my question to you is: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart...we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It’s up to us: you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control.”

Reuters winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting: “For expertly exposing the military units and Buddhist villagers responsible for the systematic expulsion and murder of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, courageous coverage that landed its reporters in prison.”

The Independent Press Standards Organisation upholding a complaint against a Boris Johnson column in the Daily Telegraph which inaccurately claimed the public favoured a no deal Brexit: "The publication had not provided any data which supported the author’s claim either that a no-deal Brexit was the option preferred 'by some margin' over the three options listed, or that these represented '…all of the options suggested by pollsters'. Instead it had construed the polls as signalling support for a no deal, when in fact, this was the result of the publication either amalgamating several findings together, or interpreting an option beyond what was set out by the poll as being a finding in support of a no deal Brexit. This represented a failure to take care over the accuracy of the article in breach of Clause 1 (i)."

The Telegraph defending Johnson's column to Ipso: "The writer was entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions and that the complainant had misconstrued the purpose of the article; it was clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters."

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