Another reason for disliking Assange is jealousy. He has scooped all of these journalists who abuse him thousand times over, by releasing sensational material that exposes the dirty secrets they would love to get their hands on.
In recent history only one reporter, Seymour Hersh, without the technical ability to penetrate government vaults that Wikipedia's sources have and relying entirely on his human sources, has come anywhere close to what Assange has achieved. Hersh is the greatest reporter of this age, or just about any age, a model of courage and the determination to dig for the truth, whatever the obstacles.
His fate is instructive. He broke the My Lai massacre in 1968, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison torture in 2004 and he broke many other stories in between, yet when he crossed the government-media line on Syria by exposing the falsity of the claim that the Syrian government was responsible for an alleged chemical weapons attack close to Damascus in 2013 his usual outlet, the New Yorker, refused to publish. The story was handed to the Washington Post, which also turned it down. The arguments that it did not meet their standards don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Eventually, the London Review of Books took the story on but when Hersh followed up with an account questioning the trans-Atlantic government and media line on the alleged role of the Syrian government in the alleged chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhun in April, 2017, the LRB declined to publish even though it had paid for the story.
Subsequently, Hersh had to publish in Germany ('Khan Sheikhun Trump's Red Line,' Welt am Sonntag, June 25, 2017) and he now has no place anywhere in the mainstream print media of his own country.
Another reason for journalists disliking Assange is that in one way or another, they are not free to write what they want. They belong to institutions, 'belonging' defined as owned by them. They depend on them for their salaries and their careers. Basically they are correct when they say 'No-one tells me what to write.' No one has to tell them because they already know what to write if they want to keep their jobs, wherever they happen to work.
Self-censorship is central to the practice of journalism in the mainstream. No-one with an eye on their best interests is going to write something they know editors will throw in their face, not because it is badly written but because it goes against the editorial line. They might be lucky enough to agree with the editorial line anyway but if they don't they have to adjust, or look for a future in journalism elsewhere.
Thus, journalists have power, the power and the money of the institution behind them. Assange has no institution behind him. Indeed, the institutions are all against him. A media which used him up has abandoned him. The government of his own country, Australia, has not lifted a finger in his defense.
What Assange does have behind him is the power of the truth-telling that should be the core of journalism, not the truth-tailoring and the acceptance of downright lies that characterizes much of mainstream journalism today. So of course the journalists don't like him, or should we say 'journalists', because who is doing the real work of journalism today, they or Julian Assange?
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