Details of Assange case are starting to disappear

I was reminded of Julian Assange last night when another segment came on the nightly news detailing the progress of the extradition case currently being heard in the UK. Assange is still in prison and his future remains up in the air. I wonder how he is faring and I remember again the first time I saw Julian, in 2009, when I was at my computer and I saw a video of a young man enthusiastically making an announcement at a podium. Assange quickly became a global phenomenon and the waters soon became muddy.

I’ve long been a supporter of Julian though I don’t think he’s ever been a journalist. Because he was publishing documents it’s possible to confuse categories but his relationship with the media has always been contradictory and rebarbative. The number of journalists this publisher has pissed off is very long and I have no doubt he’ll continue to try to use the media for his own purposes as time passes.

‘Don’t extradite Assange’ read this sign (see above). ‘Don’t extradite our rights,’ it goes on, conflating the destiny of the sign’s subject and that of the person holding it. I can feel the anger and I share a part of it myself. I just don’t know what the US has against Assange, and hope that, at the very least, that part of justice that is the public airing of positions can be allowed, with the help of the appropriate authorities, to take effect. 

The above photo shows the beginning of the forgetting. It was necessary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to put up a shot showing a newspaper headline in order to orient viewers. Perhaps without such an establishing shot many would be puzzled over the identity of this person with the strange name.

Assange will continue to polarise and to unite. The following photo shows a few of the people who were outside on the street in London for the protest against the UK authorities. People are angry that Julian is still locked up and in a way they have a right to be angry. I sometimes feel puzzled by the state of affairs but I want to know more. 

'China Tonight' hits the spot

I hadn’t watched this program before, feeling some measure of resentment on account of Stan Grant’s constant shifting within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It seemed as though every time I looked at the primary digital channel he was hosting a different show. ‘Matter of Fact’, another late-night show, was cancelled after 10 months and then Grant moved to Doha to work with Al Jazeera (which I have problems with). 

Now he’s back though it remains to be seen how long the China program will last for. I wonder why Grant is such a butterfly? Is the problem with him or with the ABC? To make ‘China Tonight’ he teams up with Yvonne Yong, who started working at the national broadcaster in 2016 and has also worked with Sky News in London.

Grant worked in China for many years and Yong speaks Mandarin so the two hosts have a good pedigree and what I saw is promising. This type of program is especially important due to the lack of news coming out of China on account of the Communist Party’s iron-like grip on the flow of information. This has gone so far as to spawn new social media platforms for Chinese people, which are rigorous in their obedience to the Party. There is no such thing as a free media in China so Grant and Yong provide an unusual window onto its public sphere. As I’ve written in the past, much of what passes for public debate happens on social media, which can become quite boisterous despite the Party’s hunger for total control.

In the show of 18 October I saw some evidence of a peculiarly Chinese form of cancel culture. Whereas in the West when someone is cancelled it’s at the instigation of random actors who build momentum for action, in China it’s the Party that orders and carries out the cancellation, even leading to actors in movies having their names removed from credits. It’s Orwellian, and I’ve got Grant and Yong to thank for supplying light in a space characterised by darkness.

The Age selectively turns off replies to tweets

Having posted yesterday on a tweet involving Gina Reinhart that had replies turned off I’ve scouted out some tweets from the same source with the reply function still on. This seems to be the default position.

The following tweets had replies enabled. First, one about supermarkets and the competition offered by retailer Aldi.

Next is a tweet about a local Australian Netflix employee.

Next is a women’s health story. Another noncontentious one.

Finally there’s one about vaccines for Covid – potentially contentious but still getting the liberal treatment.

It seems that consumer affairs, health, and industrial relations are less contentious than climate change. The newspaper's editors are obviously concerned about the High Court decision that makes media companies liable for comments on posts they put up. That case resulted from comments left on a Facebook post.

The Age has turned off comments for Twitter posts

I discovered this on the morning of 7 October when I wanted to reply to a post editors had put up about Gina Reinhart saying that humans weren’t affecting the climate. See image below.

This is fairly alarming though I saw the same morning (it was about 8.30am) that the Guardian and the New York Times hadn’t followed suit. It’s alarming for the same reason that it’s alarming when politicians block people on Twitter. This is because dialogue is the raison d’etre of social media and, for a journalist or politician, obstructing it must be viewed with a feeling of disquiet.

Though you can understand why some might take this step. When a journalist or a politician criticises social media on account of the tone of debate social media responds by doubling down, so you see two sides ranked like opposing football teams, each one eager to prove itself in the contest. Some people keep away. Others keep silent and watch from the sidelines.