(ewasserman.com) - A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best:
“Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.”
The writer, somebody called “edensasp,” was referring to news that
Wikileaks—the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing
governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets–was
suspending operations.
Why? Had its leader, the mercurial Julian Assange, been indicted? Had
the black choppers swooped in and taken him out? No, nothing that
cinematic. It was the bankers. A handful of big money handlers decided
they wouldn’t process donations to Wikileaks, it had exhausted its
reserves, and it was going broke.
The fund cutoff started in December 2010. That’s when Visa,
MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America discovered
their patriotic duty.
At the time, five of the world’s top news organizations—The Guardian,
The New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel—had begun
publishing articles based on a remarkable trove of U.S. State Department
cables shared with them by Wikileaks. The organizations had spent
months sifting from among the documents, eliminating those they thought
might cause needless harm. They then launched a barrage of articles
derived from candid reports from U.S. diplomats that exposed official
lies, both our country’s and dozens of others’.
But official lies have their supporters too, and there was a huge
fuss. Because the secret cables were American—even if the people whom
the secrecy protected often were not—U.S. politicians led the charge
against Wikileaks. Assange was denounced as “a high-tech terrorist,”
law-makers demanded his head, and Attorney General Eric Holder launched a
criminal investigation of his operation.
And so the money-handlers were stirred to action. Within days
Wikileaks was under a financial stranglehold, and it now says its
revenues dropped from $140,000 a month to less than a tenth that.
Why did the companies do it? PayPal, the flagship paymaster of the
digital world, said it forbids payments to anything that “encourages”
illegal activity, and MasterCard said its “rules prohibit customers from
directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is
illegal.”
Really? “Indirectly facilitating” an illegal act? Think about that.
It’s a formulation a second-year law student could tear apart as not
just unenforceable, but unintelligible. Doesn’t selling gasoline
“indirectly facilitate” speeding? How much of what we consider normal
commerce would escape that catchall? Shouldn’t Bank of America require
you to apply for your next ATM withdrawal, just in case?
Besides, what was the illegal act that was facilitated? Nobody has
suggested the publications that used the material acted illegally.
And don’t we normally punish after conviction, not before? (Nearly a year later, Wikileaks hasn’t even been charged.)
The explanation was hogwash, of course. It seems obvious the
money-handlers’ actions were political, not legal. The financial
industry isn’t particularly popular right now, and in the wake of the
worst banking meltdown in generations Obama administration officials had
made a special point of denouncing the consumer finance sector for its
furtive charges and extortionate rates. With regulation looming, tossing
a bone to the Justice Department had to make sense.
And they’ve gotten away with it, largely because of the news media’s
own deep ambivalence about Wikileaks. McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef
recently reported that support for WikiLeaks was generally weak among
U.S. journalists. A committee of the Overseas Press Club of America, she
noted, had decided Assange was “not one of us,” the National Press Club
wouldn’t comment on whether he should be charged criminally, and such
renowned media champions as Floyd Abrams, who helped represent the New
York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, and Lucy Dalglish, head of the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, question whether Wikileaks
deserves the protections journalists warrant.
Assange has helped arm his critics by releasing in September, without
editorial review, the unpublished remnants of the 250,000-document
State Department trove that the five news organizations had so carefully
picked through last December.
Still, the logic under which critics deny Wikileaks standing as a
journalism organization is, to me, baffling. At considerable risk, it
acquires information of vast public significance and makes it publicly
available. Its disclosures have made headlines worldwide, and have been
credited with helping nourish pro-democracy forces with solid
information about their own corrupt governments. That sounds like
journalism.
Some say Wikileaks has been secretive and irresponsible. If so, it
has plenty of company. Any number of perfectly legitimate news
organizations resist scrutiny and can be irresponsible in the stories
they mangle, overplay or ignore.
That’s regrettable, but the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee a
responsible media. It guarantees a media free of censorship. And the
principle is the same, regardless of whether the censors are government
apparatchiks or private-sector toadies who decided, out of
self-interest, to pin a deputy’s badge on their lapels.
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