Debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist is irrelevant. He changed journalism forever

‘Is it foolish to ask if Assange is a journalist? Clearly, he has committed acts of journalism. And he has published true facts,’ Margaret Simons writes. Photograph: Rick Rycroft/AP

The two most consequential Australians in history are surely Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange. Germaine Greer would come a distant third.

Unsurprisingly, Assange and Murdoch have gained their notoriety through journalism and the media. More surprising – but significant – is the fact both of them could be described as libertarians.

Assange emerged from the free software, cypherpunk movement of the 1990s, which saw the great question of the times as being how a free internet and an uncensored flow of information could lead to the triumph of privacy and personal freedom over an oppressive state.

When he founded WikiLeaks, he argued it would pressure “unaccountable and secretive institutions … to act ethically”. He embraced the idea the state – at least the surveillance state – could not survive mass-scale “principled leaking”. He was an anarchist.

Murdoch, on the other hand, began as a “zealous Laborite” according to his father, Keith. He soon dropped his socialist ideas but remained anti-establishment. In 1999 he told journalist William Shawcross that he identified as a libertarian. That meant “as much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible”.

Murdoch had limits, though. He added: “I’m not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit.” Libertarian, then, but not an anarchist.

Perhaps that difference is why Murdoch has become part of the establishment and a king-maker within it, whereas Assange is a convicted felon and has spent five years in jail.

Some of the discussion about Assange’s guilty plea concerns the question of whether or not he is a journalist.

It’s an arid debate, which overlooks the obvious truth: he and the technological revolutions of which he is part have changed journalism, forever.

Assange registered the domain name for WikiLeaks in 2006 – the same year Twitter was invented, and Facebook opened itself for the public to use. They made the previous innovation of blogging close to redundant.

For the first time in human history, anyone with an internet connection could publish to the world.

There was a raging debate, back then, about “bloggers v journalists”, with the media professionals asserting that bloggers could not be relied upon to behave responsibly. Meanwhile some bloggers questioned whether journalists were needed at all in the new era of “citizen journalism” and crowd-sourced information.

How things have changed. Today, blogging has been co-opted by the mainstream media as a way of preserving its place at the centre of public conversation. Liveblogging is a new journalistic skill, aggregating cut-down professional news reports with a welter of material from social media.

As for citizen journalists, we hear that term less these days, although the phenomenon is very much part of the way the world works.

Would #blacklivesmatter have happened, or happened in the same way, if there hadn’t been a smartphone recording the 2020 murder of George Floyd? More recently, much of the material out of Gaza has come to us through social media publication by citizens who don’t necessarily identify as journalists.

So, is it foolish to ask if Assange is a journalist? Clearly, he has committed acts of journalism. And he has published true facts.

The main conversation about the internet is not about freedom, but rather regulation and censorship

Yet professional journalism has not become redundant. Back in 2006 there was an expectation that a tide of citizens would begin to publish reports of council meetings, parliament and the courts.

No such tide emerged. Such reporting is time-consuming slog, with no glamour. People won’t do it for nothing, or not for long – yet the cumulative impact of such work is one of the most important benefits of news media. Leaks are not necessarily the most important thing.

Meanwhile other journalistic roles have had to be constantly rediscovered. Wikipedia, which was one of the inspirations for WikiLeaks, started as a free-for-all – but quickly reinvented a hierarchy of editors.

Likewise, Assange realised that if he wanted impact and credibility, he needed the mainstream media. He collaborated with several large media outlets, including this one, and fell out with most of them.

One of the main points of contention was the issue of redaction. WikiLeaks didn’t believe in editing. As the then investigations editor of the Guardian, David Leigh, has recalled, “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try to persuade me to cross a few things out’.”

Assange was an anarchist trying to work with an institutional media that was both part of the political system and its scrutineer – a force for reform, rather than revolution.

Nevertheless, he changed the institutional media. The phenomenon of the mass data dump began with WikiLeaks. Since then we have had the Paradise Papers, the revelations of former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the mass surveillance of citizens, and many more.

WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic cables changed our knowledge of how the world works. It accelerated the political changes of the Arab spring. Other leaks revealed details of extrajudicial killings in Kenya, China’s repression of dissidents, and financial corruption in the US and Peru.

Then, by publishing Democratic party emails hacked by the Russian intelligence agencies, Assange arguably assisted the election of Donald Trump.

Which brings us back to Murdoch.

His Fox News promoted Trump, then peddled the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. That helped to incite the Capitol riots and a crisis in US democracy that may yet make the country ungovernable.

Citizens rallied against the state, prompted in part by internet publication. We saw it in Washington in 2021, and in the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown rallies throughout the world during Covid.

What Assange had not foreseen was that lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation would ride the free internet at least as easily as truth and transparency.

And so to our own time, when the main conversation about the internet is not about freedom, but rather regulation and censorship.

It’s worth reflecting that if a young Assange had been prevented from using the internet bulletin boards and forums in the 80s, then he would likely not have developed his political ideas.

Yet today, limiting social media use to people over the age of 16 is apparently bipartisan policy in Australia.

After a few decades of the historical novelty of a world in which previously ignored points of view can take centre stage, it seems we don’t like it very much and are ill-equipped to cope. The damage to democracy, but also to our young people, is judged to be too much.

And so it seems that we are prepared to trade at least some aspects of freedom of speech in return for civility. Or niceness. Or safety. Or something.

Meanwhile, the professional news media, largely behind paywalls, is in a sense no longer ‘mass’ media. Only 21% of Australians pay to access news.

Consumption of professional journalism in Australia correlates well with political understanding, research shows, but it is increasingly something done by the elite.

The latest Digital News Report, released earlier this month, shows that almost half of Australians use social media to access news, up by 4% from last year. For nearly two-thirds of Gen Z, social media is the main news source. Only 40% say they trust the mainstream media, and 68% of people say they actively avoid reading the news.

Assange once wrote that “truth” would make “people free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite void and choose wonder … smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new”.

Now Julian Assange is free. And so is Rupert Murdoch.

And rather than sow the seeds of a new enlightenment, we may have created a new dark age in which we can’t tell what is true, and what is myth.