Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, discusses the Julian Assange case in light of his recent guilty plea and subsequent release from custody. Noting how this directly impacts press freedom and government secrecy, Gosztola argues that the plea deal struck with Assange is not the primary problem threatening journalism. Instead, he postulates that the threat posed by the Assange case is that he should never have been prosecuted in the first place. Gosztola covers how Assange “pled guilty to journalism” in large part because of the Espionage Act (1917) which has been contemporarily used as a “firm hand of stern repression” (Woodrow Wilson) to go after whistleblowers. At one point in the discussion, Julian Vigo speculates as to whether Assange, had he been free this past decade, might have been able to break the stories on the “gender industry” and the “sterilisation of children” far earlier, given the many journalists and whistleblowers who have been sidelined from their own publications and institutions (eg. Suzanne Moore, David Bell, Sonia Appleby) over this very subject. From there [record scratch], the discussion shifts radically in focus and tenor.
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