Hero or villain?

A practical journalist often behaves like a burglar. [S]he breaks through other people’s defences and makes off with valuable pieces of information. Morally speaking, everything depends, of course, on whether it’s done in a good cause.

I recently watched MP Harriet Harman gravely chairing the committee that convicted Boris Johnson of lying: she and I carried out such a journalistic burglary together more than 40 years ago. We published a pile of government documents. Harman obtained them as a lawyer during litigation against the Home Office, and turned them over to me, a young Guardian reporter. The files about “Control Units”, a cruel prison regime, were supposed to be a great secret and cries went up of “contempt of court”. It helped launch Harman on a political career that culminated very satisfyingly this year in Johnson-squashing. Hers was the official validation of the continuing need in a democracy for truth and openness in the public interest.

But yes, as we all know, when journalists burgle in a bad cause, the case is opposite. The work then becomes “phone hacking”, “blagging”, and various forms of intrusion, theft, bullying and blackmail, which are, or ought to be, criminal offences. Selling extra newspapers in Britain by snooping on Prince Harry’s love life certainly does constitute another highly practical form of journalism. But that doesn’t make it OK.

There is one person who is currently growing grey in the British high-security jail at Belmarsh. For him, these discussions about the nature of journalism are more than abstract. This lonely soul is the somewhat autistic Australian Julian Assange, bidding fair in the eyes of his supporters to become the hacker equivalent of the long-imprisoned Count of Monte Cristo. He has now been incarcerated one way and another for more than a decade, and the US authorities are still demanding his extradition in order to lock him up over there for a lot longer still.

Assange claims to be a journalist. “Guilty of journalism” is the title a young disciple like Kevin Gosztola gives his rambling US polemical book about him. Is it true? And if it is true, does it matter? And if it matters to him, does that mean it matters to the rest of us? I am a bit conflicted in approaching these questions because, as The Guardian’s investigations editor at the time, I was heavily involved with Assange and his 2010 information burglaries. Some of the Assangistas still try to improve their hero’s legal position by saying I, as a mainstream journalist, was as bad – or worse – than him, or that I must have told lies about his poor behaviour. Equally trying to my patience is that, from the opposite direction, I am currently being badgered by the FBI to be a prosecution witness against him. As also is his ghostwriter, Andrew O’Hagan, who responded, according to the Melbourne Age, that “I would not give a witness statement against a fellow journalist”.

A fellow journalist? Let’s see. Using modern methods, Assange cyber-burgled a mass of information held in US military databases, via a disaffected young soldier. He then passed it over for publication to a group of international newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times. The material included thousands of reports of moments of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and details of many US diplomats’ worldwide reports home. Burglarising official information and publishing it is indeed what journalists regularly do. So yes, just like me with Hattie Harman, Assange was certainly acting as a journalist, or at any rate as a publisher. He was not stealing material to sell it privately or to a foreign enemy, which is espionage.

Does being a journalist help him? Legally, it plays to an extent into US ideas of constitutional sanctity for press freedom. But ethically speaking, it may not entitle Assange to our support. Journalists, as we see, do bad things as well as good things. So, was Assange’s behaviour in the public interest? Was it “good” journalism? I would say probably, largely yes. It enabled people to see that the US killed numbers of innocent foreigners. Assange did recklessly publish too much of the material himself and was cavalier about the potential danger to individuals. But there was no evidence of great harm done, apart from a few diplomats being embarrassed. Unlike the US military, he does not have blood on his hands. On balance, he passes the public interest test.

Nevertheless, I don’t believe this strange extradition saga threatens the future of journalism generally. The US is simply bullying Britain in this one case because it can. Nothing new there. The real current issue is that Assange has already suffered enough. Never mind all the theology: to free him now with time served would be humane. Practical journalists could maybe campaign for that.