VP: You've spent a lot of time at the New York Times. If you and I were sitting there in that beautiful office in New York City, a gorgeous office, and we were somehow in an editorial board meeting, I would imagine that you and I would insist that today's editorial -- that is the day after Julian Assange has been picked up from the Ecuadorian Embassy -- today's editorial must lead with that quotation. We must show, as a media house, that there has been an attempt -- a conspiracy even -- an attempt to create distrust in an organization that has revealed this important -- which we also reported on!
CH: Right. And they destroyed [WikiLeaks] financially by blocking its Paypal accounts and everything else. WikiLeaks and Assange, at a certain moment, were heroes, even within the mainstream press. We must not forget The New York Times and Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde -- they all published this material.
VP: That's very important! They published this material. At the time they understood the value of the material, even though they hedged and they this and that, nonetheless they published the material. They have amnesia about their own sense of trust of that organization. That's should be something we remind them of. You utilized the material when it was convenient to you. When the United States government said smear their reputation, destroy them you joined the bandwagon.
CH: Coming out of the New York Times culture, what Assange did was shame them into telling the truth. This is what the alternative media traditionally does to the commercial media. They realized that for WikiLeaks to put this material out and for them to ignore it, would essentially destroy their credibility, although they've done a pretty good job of destroying their own credibility as a newspaper organization. I want to close by talking about -- and this is from Julian Assange's book, "Cypherpunks" where he talks about what he calls "The layers of indirection and obfuscation about what is happening." He said: "These layers give the deniability to censorship" and he says:
"You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand and that is by intention. The tip is public libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military and so on, publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don't want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship, to not end up there."
CH: I covered the Middle East. That is almost every reporter who covers, in particular, the Palestinians. Then:
"The next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage, inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy, what it is economic to write about even if you don't include the economic factors from higher up on the pyramid. The next layer is the prejudice of readers, who only have a certain amount of education so therefore on one hand they're easy to manipulate with false information and on the other hand, you can't tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution; for example some people just don't have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid -- what The Guardian is doing with its Cablegate redactions is the second layer."
CH: He's right. You have all these forces, many of which that are subterranean, that essentially block [the truth]. I used to say that the unofficial motto of The New York Times is do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend on access and money. As a reporter you might be able to alienate them once in a while, but if you consistently alienate them you become a management problem, as I did.
VP: You become a management problem. You also are portrayed as unhinged. This is a very important. Why are there so many conspiracy theories in the 20th and 21st century? Secrecy breeds that. The secrecy state, or the culture of secrecy of governments, sends people into the sewers looking for explanations. You want people to have a rational, reasonable understanding -- tell us what's happening. When you actually look at what's happening, it doesn't look very reasonable and rational. It looks very ugly.
CH: Thanks, Vijay. That was the historian Vijay Prashad.
We must now all resist. We must in every way possible put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called "the enemy of the people," to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the ecosystem, and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich, and consolidate the global oligarch's total grip on power, will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.
The transcript was prepared by Naila Kauser.
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