Some:
Rather than address the important legal, political and journalistic questions surrounding the Assange case, the Guardian and other papers that collaborated with him turned his persecution into nothing more than a simple-minded Hollywood drama, with Assange reduced to the satirical description offered by Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone of a “stinky Nazi rapist Putin puppet Trump supporter”.
No, the reason why the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other media suddenly care about Assange’s fate has nothing to do with principle – legal or journalistic. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment, which has been under threat since Assange was forced to hole up in Ecuador’s embassy in 2012, after he was granted political asylum.
These same newspapers ignored the political reasons Assange was in the embassy so they could pretend he had simply run away from a sexual assault investigation in Sweden. They also ignored or ridiculed the ruling in 2016 of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, some of the world’s foremost legal experts who found that the UK and Sweden were violating international law and Assange’s most basic rights in keeping him locked up in the embassy. The Guardian mocked the ruling as a “publicity stunt”.
No, the reason these papers now care about Assange nine years too late is because for the first time they are specifically in the firing line too. They collaborated with him on the very matters – US war crimes – he now faces extradition over. If Assange goes down as a spy for his activities as a journalist, these papers and their editors could end up in trouble too, exposed to the threat of espionage charges themselves.