This is the second part of a report on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange by 4Corners of ABC Australia. Unfortunately, it suffers from all the faults of the first report, and then some.
The story is taken up after Julian is given asylum inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in 2012. Of course, WikiLeaks' work didn't stop there, and they continued to release information that was important to be known in the public arena many times after that.
This film focuses though on WikiLeaks' release of the Democratic Party's emails in 2016 which showed how corrupt the party had become, and how the election of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate was rigged all the way through.
Again, instead of focusing on the corruption – which is surely the ‘story’ here – the programme decides to implicate Julian as being a tool of Russian intelligence agencies and the Trump campaign. It never seems to occur to them that what saw Clinton fail was simply an exposure of her, and her party's, deeply corrupt practices.
I publish the film here, taking it that my readers are able to make their own judgements, and because I think the distortions that are on display are indeed part of the story about Julian and WikiLeaks.
The film makers accuse Julian of being a puppet, without ever reflecting of whether they themselves are puppets of the powers that be, and are playing right into their hands. I think myself it is a sad reflection of the state of the mainstream media today.
