Friday, December 14, 2018

Time, Trib's salute to free press truth telling only goes so far


The Trib's editorial "Time's salute to truth-telling during 'the War on Truth', extolling Time Magazine's selection of nine journalists killed, imprisoned or being investigated for practicing press freedom, rings hollow due to omission of US-UK hunted journalist Julian Assange. The Trib laments the June 28 murder of 5 Capital Gazette journalists by a crazed gunman and the October 2 murder of US based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government. But where was the Trib and Time when establishment political figures such as Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, former Pentagon official K. T. McFarland, Fox News commentator Bob Beckel and Canadian Prime Minister adviser Tom Flanagan were all calling for the death penalty, even assassination of journalist Assange for publishing purloined, classified US documents identifying US war crimes in Iraq. The Trib boasts of America's constitutional press protection, lamenting President Trump's inflammatory rhetoric against the establishment press which the Trib deems "dangerous". No such outcry when Trump, back in 2010, invoked the "death penalty" solution for Assange's giving America and the world truth about our grotesque, criminal Iraq war. The Trib closed by proclaiming its free press practitioners will "be humbled by a moment in the limelight"..then get back to work. Assange will neither be humbled by his 8 years of imprisonment in London's Ecuador embassy or get back to work. He's fighting for his life.

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