Journalists cheered Assange's abuse. Now they've paved his path to a US gulag

Journalists are on the cusp of losing their jobs and it's the greatest thing that could happen. For decades, perhaps centuries, they are propaganda arms but now every man with a camera is a better cameraman and every man with a blog is a better writer.

Newspapers are doomed. Not because they transformed into liars but because what they can give us can now be given to us by others much better and we don't really need the lies anymore. In their effort to stay relevant they have tried to be more opinionated, but if I just want you to give me your opinion I could get that from smarter people on Twitter rather than some guy who barely knows how to read and write sleep-deprivedly rewriting an AP/Reuters text - which in itself is about 95% bullshit anyway.

Perhaps only sports journalists need professionally exist.

There are still people who fall for the broken media, though. And fortunately, that is a good thing for the rest of us. While HN celebrated the "discovery" of SuperMicro's "spying", I loaded up on cheap SMCI. Keep doing what you're doing. Making money is all the sweeter this way because someone else is losing it to me.

Contemporary journalism failed to be critical, perhaps as a reactionary compensation to really borderline insane theories sometimes spread through the net, but it was not the first time they supported questionable decisions through biased reporting.

But everyone reiterating the Russia collusion and framed Assange as a Russian asset should be ashamed of themselves and other journalists should be ashamed to share the same profession. There was little reporting and a lot of hit jobs.

Yes, there are even worse cases like governments poisoning critics like Nawalny. It doesn't even take much to notice that a redirection is also an admission of guilt.

Perhaps journalism deserves the precarious position they find themselves in, but an open and honest press is something bitterly needed. There are some good outlets which suffer immensely under the pressure of the attention economy, but a lot of mainstream news media has degraded to entertainment to satisfy emotional needs of their readers.

For example, concerning leaked internal Democratic emails "An even more important point, however, is that a transparency organisation like Wikileaks had no choice, after it was handed those documents, but to expose abuses by the Democratic party – whoever was the source."

I'm pretty sure Wikileaks is the sole authority when it comes to what they publish so they have that choice, and I'll never consider it ethical to leak internal documents of a political organisation, likely by a foreign party, to influence domestic politics.

I lost virtually all respect for Assange after reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book on Wikileaks and Assange's conduct. Domscheit-Berg was second-in-command at Wikileaks, so it's hard to pretend that all of this is conjured up by the US government.