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Comment by napoleond | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, "state-sponsored" TV doesn't necessarily imply what you're suggesting. If Assange appeared on the BBC or the CBC, you would not accuse him of being a shill for the British or Canadian governments.

EDIT: Of course I'm aware that Russia has a different relationship with its media than the UK, Canada, etc. Just pointing out a thing.

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You could accuse him of being a shill if he repeatedly appeared on the BBC solely to advance the policies of the British government. Assange didn't merely appear on RT, he hosted a weekly show on RT entitled "The World Tomorrow with Julian Assange" which featured a who's-who of US critics. That's a bit more than an occasional appearance on BBC.

I don't know enough about the BBC to comment on its independence from the UK government. On national security and signals intelligence matters, I do not have a lot of faith in the UK government.

Right, me neither, and yet no one would ever use one of Assange's multiple appearances on the BBC as evidence that he's a shill for the British government. (I do concede that giving interviews is different from having his own show, but can't really think of a way that it matters in this context.)

It does certainly seem like Wikileaks is mainly focused on publishing anti-US material, but I can think of a million reasons for that which are more plausible than them being in Putin's pocket (which, in fairness, you've merely implied).

EDIT: No idea why you're being down-voted. I've up-voted in case it helps. To everyone else: I know it's become customary to down-vote for disagreement, but in situations like this it discourages dialogue.

There's a decent amount of documentation as to the role of the Kremlin in RT's editorial process.

I don't have any examples in mind but I feel like the BBC has never held back on criticizing the government/people in power, and doing reports on gov't scandals and the like.

In the run-up to the Iraq war the BBC was very much a mouthpiece for the UK government.

As a rule of thumb you can use any news service as a source of information as long as you don't use it for information about the government of the country where it originates from and the major adversaries of that government or country.

That makes reading the news and staying current a lot harder and probably will require you to gain language proficiency beyond what you can get at through the English language press.

So what? How is this relevant to the discussion? We're not talking about whether state-sponsored media is a bad idea (I think it is, too!) We're discussing the question of whether Wikileaks has weird ties to Russia. Its founder and leader has a show on Russia's state-sponsored propaganda network. That is, in fact, a tie to Russia.

We can debate whether it's a meaningful or indicative tie. That seems like a live debate. But "the BBC was a mouthpiece for the Iraq War effort" isn't germane to this discussion. I agree that it was too. Believe it or not: it is possible to (a) oppose the Iraq War, (b) believe that it was disingenuously sold to the American and British people through media manipulation, (c) oppose the NSA, and (d) still think Wikileaks is suspicious and untrustworthy. I fall into that a-b-c-d bucket.

You're focussing too much on the messenger, focus on the message.

I didn't notice the downvotes, but thanks anyways.

RT is an organ of Russian government propaganda.

If the US had a meaningful state sponsored media presence, I'm sure it would be bad too. But nobody should kid themselves about what RT is.

> EDIT: No idea why you're being down-voted.

Making wild accusations with absolutely no proof would be my guess. Also the bogus moral equivalence he used to kick this thread off.

For whatever it's worth to you: I think it's telling that you thing the allegations I'm bringing up are "wild". They obviously aren't that: they're first-Google-SERP, running- under- the- Guardian- masthead allegations. I didn't make any of them up. I didn't get them from WorldNetDaily. What your wording suggests is that you'd find any allegation that challenged your perception of Wikileaks to be wild and unfounded.

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