Julian Assange is a journalist? Not sure I agree with that labeling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Honours_and_awa...
"Not a real journalist" opinions follow the "Not a real X." where X can also be American, Patriot, good persont etc. where informally deciding something allow you to strip them their rights.
I think Assange has gone shit over the time, but that does not mean that I jump into the bandwagon where I change categories arbitrarily and quit tinkling based on general principles.
When Assange wants to be a journalist, he should receive critique as a journalist. He certainly has screwed up plenty. But he should also receive some protections when appropriate.
So I think relativism doesn’t help here.
He selectively revealed truths that were hidden from us by people who were either out-right lying, or were totally ignorant to the existence of what was revealed.
So, as a citizen, do I trust an individual who selectively introduces me to information, or do I trust the large conglomerate governments which I now know to wholeheartedly lie to me on a repeated basis?
In old Louisiana parlance : " if I gotta choose between bags of shit, i'll take the one that comes with the clothes pin for my nose. "
That could cut out a lot. So much of journalism sits in a grey area in the middle of that.
edit - With my cynical hat on, the mainstream press, a. shifts product, b. sways opinion and c. tells stories that it thinks people are interested in to help a. and b.
The press has found over time that most of the new stories people are interested in are in some regard varying degrees of true, or at least based on the fact something may have happened, so it publishes those. Actually publishing truth is something it essentially does entirely by accident, almost in the same way as Hollywood occaisionaly produces art.
Check.
You can argue about whether his style is commendable or not (for codes of conduct see [2]), but that does not change the fact that he is a journalist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.
I don't know, ask Wikipedia, because my comment was using the definition you provided via that site.
Either way, the answer isn't relevant to Assange or Wikileaks. He's not an editor in chief, because he doesn't run an organization which has editorial policies or which writes stories which have to conform to those policies. We disagree that the definition you provided applies to Assange - as I see it, it clearly doesn't.
There's a reason Snowden didn't go to Wikileaks - he wanted journalists to handle the release of his information responsibly, and to provide the necessary context and framing narrative to the public. Wikileaks would simply have dumped all of them onto the web, because that's what they do.
A publisher, maybe. But I'm squarely in the 'not a journalist' camp.