Excluded Headlines - As a journalist: what the Assange plea means for freedom of information
Stay up to date on the Global South news stories the US- and Eurocentric media overlook, with author and journalist, Tamara Pearson.
The point of journalism is to reveal the truth, as uncomfortable or inconvenient as that truth may be, in order to have a more intelligent, aware, world that is able to judge and make informed decisions. The goal is utter transparency of systemic crimes, from environmental destruction through to racism, corruption, wars, and rights violations, so that lack of information doesn't become a tool to sustain injustice.
That means revealing and criticising and contextualising (for deep understanding) economic, political and social powers, including corporations and governments. It means highlighting resistance and efforts for justice. It is the good and bad news, the forces at play, how they work, and how they impact us. Anything else, is marketing.
Revealing the brutality of the US's war on Afghanistan is very much within these goals and for the public good (that public includes US citizens deprived of healthcare while its government spends up on the war machine, through to Afghani citizens, and many others).
That Assange has had to plead guilty to espionage for doing that, amounts to a criminalisation of journalists who are doing the work of exposing the predatory, violent nature of imperialist, war-mongering governments.
There are journalists globally who are doing similar such important work, who are criminalised or demonised or minimalised and silenced or made invisible — especially journalists in Gaza at the moment.
Many journalists are freelancing and putting integrity before editorial lines and pay and security. They / we are saying the hardest, most important things, showing up the corporations and governments, and so we see how these complex systems of exclusion and of downplaying imperialist crimes work.
Censorship takes many forms, and that includes severely underpaying freelance and Global South journalists, through to only publishing them if their journalism is Eurocentric or overlooks the dire impact of the US or Europe and their corporations in their countries.
Ask yourself what kind of so-called free media system ensures that Afghani journalists are never heard, never narrate the impact of the invasion of their country. Avoiding the very easy task of translating is the going excuse to send inexperienced Western (almost always male) journalists around the world to cover the Global South.
Many journalists have been threatened and murdered in Mexico, usually for daring to reveal the ways of organised crime and its links to corporations, mining, abuse of migrants, trafficking, authorities, and more. Yet there is a system of silence around the appalling conditions journalists face here. And that is intentional.
Media like the NYT are part of the problem. Not only do they have Western journalists constantly covering the Global South with a eurocentric and pro-corporate narrative and so little experience in the region that they constantly make up stuff (as they have done, time and again, about the regions I have lived in), but they are loyal to their corporate donors and the ideologies of their wealthy owners, rather than the journalistic mission of truth telling and uncovering injustices and showing up corporate and governmental power.
Despite their claims of neutrality, the NYT and BBC etc will not show the complete realities (especially not the underlying causes and context) of Gaza, nor the huge damage the US and its corporate interests is inflicting across Latin America, because they do take sides. They side with the same geopolitical interests that criminalised and locked up Assange.