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Confidential Sources: Press Freedom at Risk


For those of you who do not know, there is a prevalent issue in the world of Journalism today. Our press freedom is at risk everyday that we allow the torturing of Julian Assange to take place. 
Julian Assange, who is the founder of WikiLeaks and an Australian journalist, has been charged  with 17 counts of espionage after leaking a host of secrets that the United States government has been keeping from us, those secrets that include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

What brought a great load of attention was a video known as “Collateral Murder”, this was a video of US soldiers shooting a number of innocent people and laughing about it from a helicopter in Baghdad in 2007. Assange is now being held in confinement in the Belmarsh Prison, one of Britain's most notorious maximum-security prisons by the United States government due to espionage. He is held in solitary confinement 23 hours of  the day and is reported to be in ill conditions, sounds more like torture than jail and the United Nations agrees. 

What I find is the most outrageous part of this situation is the lack of concern there is from other journalists. When you do a google search of Julian Assange's name we see major mainstream news networks such as AP news and CNN arguing that Assange is not a journalist. The big debate is whether or not Julian Assange is a journalist or an activist. Well what makes someone a Journalist? That's the problem, there is no written definition of what gives someone the title of a journalist. If Assange is a journalist he should be protected by freedom of the press under the First Amendment, especially because he never caused a direct threat to the United States government. Who does “the press clause” protect? Is it only those of mainstream news networks instead of others?

What we do know is that Assange is a whistleblower. A whistleblower is someone who reveals confidential government information to the public. When we look back at other acts of whistleblowers it never ends well for those who are the whistleblower. For instance, in supreme court case Branzburg v. Hayes 1972 where the court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a journalist to withhold their information & sources to testify in grand jury. To this day, if the government demands your notes, information, and sources we are obligated to hand it over to them. The United States government makes it almost impossible for whistleblowers to get away with releasing government information to anyone without getting caught. The only thing that could protect journalists and whistleblowers would be a shield law, but realistically it will never be passed like all the other times it was never passed at a federal level (ex. Branzburg v. Hayes). 

Another question up for debate is: Why does the United States Law apply to Assange when he is an Australian citizen? Assange was not in the United States when the “crime” was committed. I can’t help but ask why the Australian government is not intervening in the torturing of one of their citizens. If it was an American citizen who was being treated this way by another country, the US government would intervene immediately. 
If casting light on the secrets of  the US governments and it’s massacres is an act of espionage,  then our press freedom under the First Amendment is at risk. Who does “the press clause” really protect, is it everyone or not? It is our job as journalists to shed light on the fact that the indictments for which Julian Assange is now imprisoned is an attempt to prosecute someone for committing acts of journalism.

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