Very interesting piece in Vanity Fair about why the news media has turned on WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. The story tells us as a lot about Assange..and the news media. Part of the falling out has to do with the fact that Assange is incredibly controlling, saying that he believes in transparency–but not acting that way.
“Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange — that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.”
Writer Sarah Ellison also notes that part of the clash is financial, because the mainstream media and Assange and both in financial trouble. Britain’s left-leaning Guardian was a early Assange partner, but they’ve had a falling out.
“When the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, Carolyn McCall, announced her resignation last March to take over the C.E.O. role at the discount airline company easyJet, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid, offered some unsolicited advice for her successor. ‘As a fiscally responsible chief executive, my first move would be to shut down The Guardian and The Observer tomorrow, thereby saving about 50 million a year,’ he told a local paper. ‘It would also have the pleasing effect of chucking a lot of untalented left-wing turds onto [Gordon] Brown’s bonfire. It’s a total nightmare of a job and nobody with an ounce of business acumen would touch it.’
Julian Assange’s business model appears to be no better. Although his overhead was once modest-[WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn] Hrafnsson estimates that before “Collateral Murder” [the video of American troops killing civilians in Iraq] the organization could function on a budget of $200,000 to $300,000 a year — financial needs have ballooned as the work of WikiLeaks has become more high-profile and labor-intensive. “I don’t have the exact number of people on our payroll,” Hrafnsson says, but he estimates that there are now “a few dozen people who are committed full-time” on either short-term or long-term contracts, with hundreds of volunteers contributing their work. WikiLeaks operates almost entirely on donations, and they have fallen woefully short. Finances aside, Assange’s editorial model gives pause to anyone who gets close enough to see it firsthand. And it’s not clear that an organization like his, run the way he runs it, could ever achieve anything like longevity. Committed to a form of transparency that verges on anarchy, and operating on the sly and on the fly, it is inherently unstable.”