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    Australian ABC-TV show "Four Corners" and its hit-piece against Assange Archived Message

    Posted by margo on August 5, 2019, 4:14 pm

    Hit piece - or appalling, sloppy journalism? The effects are the same:

    What does forensic investigation mean to "4 Corners"?
    Ian Rose

    Medium -- THE whole Hero or Villain dichotomy is a false narrative, and doesn’t address the importance of Julian Assange’s work, but rather polarises the conversation into a limited binary option of good or bad about his personality.

    We are yet to determine just what 4 Corners means by forensic journalism: it could be the fact that 20% of the program wasn’t tabloid speculation and opinion. 4 Corners were really scraping the bottom of the barrel by interviewing Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Alan Rusbridger, and to a lesser extent Scott Shane. In the bigger scheme of things WikiLeaks, these men had a minor involvement, the best part of a decade ago.

    Did 4 corners call this two-part program a forensic investigation because they dug up the only former employee of WikiLeaks to have been forced out of the organisation?

    If they had been truly forensic they would have known that he was asked to leave because he made an attempted take over. [Domscheit-Berg] And when he left he stole a massive cache of files sent to WikiLeaks from South America, along with a heap of servers.

    What is really embarrassing for us Australians is the way 4 Corners only sought out the opinions of editors from our colonial masters (US & UK) and none from any other country. Yet again, the old Aussie cultural cringe rears its unwarranted head.

    Assange is one of those once in a lifetime people, he has changed the face of journalism with the encrypted service no one else could have made at the time. Of course, all media outlets now use an encrypted service ...

    Assange is no hero, but he is an intelligent and altruistic Australian, living by the ideals we all like to think [we have] ourselves. If we see someone in trouble, we like to think we would assist, and often do. If we saw a crime against humanity, we like to think we would report it. And Assange has done just that, he exposed the war crimes perpetrated by the so called free world, threatening the profits of the military industrial complex. It is a crime not to report a crime in Australia, UK & US.

    It is no wonder the war profiteering oligarchs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to smear Assange,: they have a multi trillion dollar industry to protect.
    It has been Assange’s exposure of these sociopathic oligarchs, that has them so frightened.

    Assange has exposed so many wrong doings that are little known by the wider public Why didn’t 4 Corners reveal them in their “forensic investigation”?

    In his early 20s he worked with the Victorian and Federal Police to break two notorious pedophile rings.

    In the early days of WikiLeaks (approx 2008) he exposed Trafagura dumping of toxic waste, ruining lives in East African coastal villages.

    From approx 2015, he alerted the world to the machinations of the Trans Pacific Partnership and its Atlantic equivalent. And on the list goes. If 4 Corners had a quick look at wikileaks.org they would have found hundreds of Thousands of files exposing corruption.

    It would have been great if 4 Corners decided to do a bit of exposing themselves by pointing out that the UK broke international law by not allowing Assange a diplomatic car to the airport after he was granted diplomatic asylum by Ecuador. The first time that this basic law has been breached by a Western Nation.
    Yet somehow overlooked in 4 Corners “forensic investigation”, despite being alerted to this fact by @SAWCSydney multiple times prior to broadcasting.

    I wonder if this is cultural cringe ... and feeling as though we can not challenge our colonial master.

    Assange has had billions spent on him. The new Ecuadorian Government was offered two bundles of money to sweeten the deal to break international law, $4.3Billion upon release and another $6Billion a week later.
    Odd that this wasn’t talked about in 4 Corners “forensic investigation”, perhaps that is also because we could be seen to be questioning our other colonial master, the USA.

    What is equally astounding is that a supposed forensic investigation, 4 Corners managed to ignore every United Nations report, as though they didn’t even happen.

    A good starting point would have been to provide an outline of the United Nations Human Rights Commissions findings, published in 2016, or even just a quick glance at the overview.
    Most Australians know nothing of Nils Melzer’s (UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture) findings and recommendations, 31 May 2019, and 26 June 2019 these two overviews would have been a great start to a forensic investigation.

    It is equally odd that 4 Corners chose not to read anything from the Mueller Report that has exonerated Assange and WikiLeaks from the US election rigging scandal. Instead putting forward the line “Assange’s most destructive act of all was his intervention in US politics in the US election”. If there was any depth to the 4 Corners forensic investigation this approach would not have been taken.

    In light of the recent US court hearings, DNC versus Russia, Trump and WikiLeaks, that fully exonerated WikiLeaks, it would appear that 4 Corners have given new meaning to the term forensic journalism, and have found themselves on the wrong side of history.

    At heart I am an idealist and an optimist, and I am confident 4 Corners can re-evaluate its ability to meet its ideals, and be able to regain the integrity it once had by actually doing genuine forensic journalism rather than the lazy tabloid sensationalism it seems to be doing of late, resting on past glories to make it own ratings.

    The thing is 4 Corners, we can see you and we want you to be the best you can be, and stop being such toadies for war-profiteering oligarchs.

    LINK https://medium.com/@info.sawcsydney/what-does-forensic-investigation-mean-to-4corners-5ce0b13eb55a

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