Opinion

Media adore info anarchist

On Tuesday, the notorious radical mastermind of WikiLeaks turned himself in on a sexual as sault charge in London. But in the liberal media, the condemnations of Julian Assange are few.

Time magazine editor Richard Stengel, for example, told Charlie Rose on PBS that Assange is an “idealist” who “sees the US since 1945 as being a source of harm throughout the planet,” but he’s not really opposed to him. He put Assange on the cover of Time with an American flag gagging his mouth and feigned a position of balance.

In his “To Our Readers” letter, Stengel conceded Assange is out to “harm American national security,” but there is a public good unfolding, in that “the right of news organizations to publish those documents has historically been protected by the First Amendment.”

Americans the world over could die because of these intelligence betrayals. But hip, hip, hooray for the freedom of speech that got them killed?

Time hailed Assange, Australia’s “information anarchist,” with the headline “The Wizard from Oz.” There’s even buzz that Time’s editors are considering Assange as their 2010 “Person of the Year.” For the cover story, Stengel interviewed Assange over the Internet and provided a welcoming American forum for his boasts.

Stengel asked about the “unintended consequences” of Assange’s massive leaks, causing the US to “make secrets more impenetrable.” But apparently, this is an intended consequence. Assange shot back that a government clampdown on secrets is “very positive,” since government can either be “efficient, open and honest” or “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” His goal is not to make America better; it’s to harm this country.

Stengel can hear all this talk of a vast and evil US conspiracy, and the plot to make it “inefficient” in responding to enemies, and still can tell Charlie Rose that this scandalous mountain of leaks is really our own fault: “We make Julian Assange possible because we’re hiding things that shouldn’t necessarily be hidden. And we’re using technology that’s penetrable. And so, in effect, we were creating him by our own policies.”

So if our intelligence is penetrable, it’s our fault. If it’s impenetrable, we’re inefficient. Time still can’t find its way out of a paper bag to identify our evil enemies, so fixated is it on us being the enemy.

Stengel went on CNN and asserted the media’s role is to “publish and be damned,” which is the journalist’s way of saying, “The public be damned.” He added: “I believe on balance that they have been detrimental to the US. But our job is not to protect the US in that sense.”

The government doesn’t take that approach when reporters get taken hostage, as in Iran (Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari) or Afghanistan (The New York Times’ David Rohde). They don’t icily ape Stengel and boast, “It’s not the government’s job to protect journalists in that sense.” US officials work to get them released. But those same journalists can easily turn around and side with Assange — who would probably have felt no remorse over leaking that potentially deadly news.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center.