The German media and Julian Assange: Silence and slander

By Gregor Link and Johannes Stern 

13 August 2019

Over a week after a US federal court threw out a civil case brought by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) against Julian Assange, the German media has been dominated by an embarrassed silence. On July 30, Judge John Koeltl from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York struck a major blow against the Democratic Party and bourgeois media’s claim that Assange is a “Russian agent.” He explicitly rejected the assertion that the WikiLeaks founder had “conspired with Russia.”

When Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London by British police officers and thrown into the high security Belmarsh Prison, leading newspapers, including the Bild, TAZ, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, either denounced Assange or enthused over his arrest. Now, with the false allegations against Assange having been disproved in a court of law, hardly any German-speaking newspaper has found the time to report on this important development.

The only article that appears in a Google search, along with the WSWS reports, is a piece from July 31, just one day after the ruling, published in Spiegel Online entitled, “US ruling: WikiLeaks was allowed to publish hacked emails from Democrats.” The article makes a mockery of objective reporting. It typifies the bourgeois media’s role as a propaganda arm for the intelligence agencies and federal government.

The author of the article, Spiegel editor Patrick Beuth, in the face of the ruling sought to sustain the anti-Russia propaganda campaign and the fairytale of Assange and WikiLeaks serving the Putin regime. Near the beginning of the article, he writes that it has “long been beyond doubt that in 2016, Russian intelligence agencies hacked several institutions and employees of the US Democratic Party, and published the emails and documents stolen in the process—first alone, then through WikiLeaks.”

Beuth later claims that in his 81-page ruling, Judge Koeltl made clear “that he is also convinced of the Russians’ guilt.” Additionally, he asserted that “the question of whether WikiLeaks is a media organisation” had “not played a role” in Koeltl’s decision.

These are just two statements that turn reality on its head. In fact, Koeltl found that the DNC’s allegation that Assange and WikiLeaks “conspired with the Russian Federation to steal and circulate the DNC’s material” does “not correspond to the facts.” The court is also “not obliged to accept accusations as fact.” Koeltl describes WikiLeaks as an “international news organization” and Assange as a “publisher.”

For Beuth, these facts play “no role,” because he is pursuing a definite political agenda and has long been agitating against WikiLeaks. In a comment for Die Zeit, he provocatively asked in March 2017, “How does one deal with an organisation which on the one hand is extremely popular among whistleblowers and continues to receive sensitive documents, but on the other is led by a madman, who is completely oblivious to criticism, vastly exaggerates his exposures, and is suspected of being a propaganda tool of the Russian government?” Another cynical and stupid comment he wrote on April 17, 2015, was entitled, “WikiLeaks is becoming RidiculeLeaks.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/13/assa-a13.html