CN Wins First Julian Assange Award (International Category)

The Dutch Independent Journalist Association (VVJ) has awarded Consortium News the first Julian Assange International Award at a conference of the Dutch Stichting 11 September (11 September Foundation) in Driebergen, Netherlands on Saturday.

The awards committee informed CN:

“We are delighted and honoured to let you know that Consortium News have been selected as the winner of the first Julian Assange (International) Award. Your steadfast reporting on the framing and persecution of Assange, since it first started, and the excellent live tweets that enabled the world to witness the shielded court hearings in London, especially during the corona crisis, make you the perfect candidate for this prize.

The idea for the award sprouted last year, during a dinner with Julian’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, in Amsterdam. We have applied different criteria for the Dutch and the international awards:

The Dutch award will go to the independent journalist or media outlet who has, in the spirit of WikiLeaks, done most to make censored information available to the general public.

For the international award we wanted to recognise a journalist or media outlet who has been crucial to finding out the truth behind the persecution of Julian Assange.”

Consortium News started covering the Assange case on Dec. 16, 2010 with an article by founding editor Robert Parry, one of the leading investigative reporters of his generation. Bob argued that Assange was practicing journalism in the exact way that he did. He wrote:

“… the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of ‘conspiracy’ between reporter and source.

Though some elements of this suspected Assange-Manning collaboration may be technically unique because of the Internet’s role – and that may be a relief to more traditional news organizations like the Times which has published some of the WikiLeaks documents – the underlying reality is that what WikiLeaks has done is essentially “the same wine” of investigative journalism in ‘a new bottle’ of the Internet.

By shunning WikiLeaks as some deviant journalistic hybrid, mainstream U.S. news outlets may breathe easier now but may find themselves caught up in a new legal precedent that could be applied to them later.”

Since that first article, Consortium News has published more than 700 articles and 350 videos on Assange and WikiLeaks. That’s because CN recognized the historic importance of the case against Assange, which has justly been compared to the trials of John Peter Zenger and Alfred Dreyfus.

CN‘s Assange coverage has dug deeply into the meaning of the case, legally, politically and historically. It was inside the London courtroom for the February 2020 start of Assange’s extradition hearing, and has had remote video access to every part of the legal process since, publishing daily print and video reports and special editions of CN Live!