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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Please, explain how Julian Assange is a journalist.

He's a founding member of a very well known journalistic enterprise and has won an award for his journalism? He performs journalism and has done so for years? He calls himself a journalist and virtually every other journalism outlet does as well?

Do you call wikileaks a journalistic enterprise? What journalism are they performing?

Letting people upload troves of information, and just dumping them to the public without going through and vetting them, isn't journalism in my book. He's a journalist in the same sense that a data breach dumped on pastebin is a news article.

Wikileaks does vet the information and publishes in coordination with some other media. And they have a stellar record of publishing 100% true information, unlike some other major jounralistic media.

The fact that some journalists are so vehement against Assange imho proves that he s a journalist. People always shoot the messenger

While I agree with your sentiment, he does fit the description:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journalist 1.b: a writer who aims at a mass audience

ok.

Julian Assange: Technically a journalist.

> Is Assange a Journalist? It Depends What Year You Ask

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-17/is-jul...

I don't think it's a matter of explanation anymore. Whether Assange is a journalist depends on political affiliations. It's a shame that the trump election had to end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater by discrediting wikileaks. This kind of thing usually has unintented, bad consequences.

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