As of May 24) maybe a more courageous and principled rich person would buy it. Bezos paid $250 million in 2013.

it's political satire, ffs!

The levels of censorship and self-censorship going on should frighten us all.

That said, I'd have more sympathy if more members of the MSM had defended Assange.

Being a Putinist stooge? Being an accomplice to Assad's murderous regime and helping him hunt down political dissenters? Playing a small but critical role in helping giftwrap the 2016 election to Donnie? Doxxing Sony employees? Keeping quiet when dozens of real whistleblowers have been imprisoned, assassinated or otherwise "disappeared" in Russia and Red China? Squelching the Panama Papers release because all the biggest revelations were people directly connected to his buddy Vlad? For Assange to be defended by the media, wouldn't he have to be an actual journalist first instead of an information broker and blackmailer?

I could go on but you get the point...

I apparently get my facts from different sources than you do (mine including, e.g., Pulitzer- and otherwise prize-winning journalists who were pushed out of the MSM for such acts as criticizing our 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as fact-checked sources from both ends of the political spectrum).

We're already done here.

If you believe doxxing innocent victims of a hack or abetting an anti-democratic regime is "proper journalism, I can't help you.

Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, John Pilger, Robert Parry, and Seymour Hersh, among others.

Greenwald gets more vehement than I'd like, but as a Constitutional lawyer, he's excellent on many of the legal issues I care about. I also appreciate his critical assistance in helping Edward Snowden and getting his revelations published.

Hedges, as the former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, fluent in Arabic and otherwise deeply knowledgeable about the region (among his many other impressive accomplishments) is great on most of the conflicts involving Middle Eastern countries.

Matt Taibbi, again among his many other accomplishments, was the ONLY journalist who went to the trouble of really digging into and clearly explaining the causes of the Great Financial Crash of 2008 (no, it wasn't primarily the bad mortgages, as most of the media was content to repeat; it was the credit derivatives sold by AIG et al. to Goldman Sachs et al.)

Etc. If you look them all up, you may or may not agree with every word they say, but imho the depth of their research and insight and their record for accuracy is substantially better than anything coming out of either the so-called right- or so-called left-leaning MSM (which, after all, are not only much more concerned with profits but are owned and controlled by oligarchs or megacorps with their own agendas).

(I started following political news during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and it took a long time for me to become as skeptical of the MSM as I now am. But I've come to realize not only how inaccurate much of the MSM is, but also that in many cases, the most important issues are not those that "left" and "right" media most loudly disagree on, but rather the ones they scarcely mention at all.)

They all have agendas, too... Take a closer look at their history.

Hell, you do know that Greenwald got fired from his own fuckin' publication because he insisted on writing his "investigative piece" about Hunter Biden's long-debunked laptop, right? Those three guys are on the "horseshoe left" for a reason...

I suggest you find some better heroes.

our sources are clearly different.

The NYT and other sources have all conceded that that laptop was genuine; the FBI has even introduced some of its contents in at least one court case as legit evidence.

I've also seen no meaningful evidence that any of the people I mentioned have any particular relationship with either Putin or Russia, apart from Snowden's having found asylum in Russia (he hoped to make it somwhere else but was unable to do so once the US revoked his passport).

(I hope we can agree among other things that just because someone criticizes US policy doesn't make them "Putin's stooge." )

I was on DU exposing Assange and his "transparency journalists" as complete and utter frauds. I'm still waiting for someone like Taibbi to finally admit Russia was at fault for shooting down MH17. Now after recently returning to DU as a twitter refugee, I find myself doing the same thing even though there's a hundred times the readily available evidence to prove my point...

God, it's like I never left... I need to just start referring y'all to the DU archives 😏

and funny, I never saw any actual evidence that those journalists were "frauds."

There were, e.g., attempts by TPTB, which universally feared exposure of their own corruption and mistakes, to discredit Assange; but all of their smears were in turn discredited. The US government's only witness against him, a convicted fraudster who was promised leniency in exchange for testifying against Assange, recanted his allegations and never testified. The US's own indictments ended up alleging nothing more than that Assange published leaked info which the US had classified, but US officials repeatedly admitted in court that they could not name a single instance in which anyone had been seriously harmed as a result of Wikileaks publications; and nothing in the final version of the charges against Assange differed from things that other MSM publishers had done – if Assange broke the Espionage Act, so did the NYT et al.

Please feel free to link to any DU archive files that you believe contain actual evidence that has not been discredited.

not out of any love of Putin – and Hedges and Greenwald both agree he's a tyrant –– but for the reasons they've adduced at length: that we promised Russia that NATO would not expand but nonetheless expanded it to Russia's very borders; that the CIA & other US-affiliated agents have been meddling in Ukraine since 2004 and in 2014 backed a coup against Ukraine's democratically-elected president, and that the US then hand-picked that president's successor and has maintained its dominance in Kiev since; that Ukraine thereafter broke its promises pursuant to the Minsk Agreements to give Ukraine's eastern regions greater autonomy; that we're now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a war that's unlikely to conclude in a way that's any more advantageous to Ukraine than if it had simply negotiated with Russia much earlier, meanwhile leaving Ukraine decimated and far worse off than if it had negotiated earlier; that even before Russia's invasion, Ukraine was the most corrupt nation in Europe and among the most autocratic, and since the war began has become even moreso; etc.

All of that is not to justify Russia's invasion, which Hedges and Greenwald agree was clearly wrong – but to recognize as a practical matter – as did both Kissinger and Obama – that our proxy war in Ukraine is a losing proposition for Ukraine and the US as well.

Disagreeing with current US policy – perhaps particularly when it comes to war – is a fine d(D)emocratic tradition (in both senses), and I'm proud to participate in it.

I didn't use to be such a skeptic of US war policy, but as I began to observe more and more closely, I gradually realized that there was scarcely a conflict in which this has been involved in my lifetime that the US public wasn't basically lied into and that didn't leave the country we were supposedly trying to "save" worse off than it was before we got involved. I believe Ukraine to be another unfortunate example (following Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others back to Viet Nam).

I hope you're happy with the deaths that Putin's imperialism is causing. Something should give you joy, anyway. I really thought the "US-backed coup" nonsense had left DU. Did you manage to remain ignorant of the vast Putin-backed corruption the "democratically-elected president" of Ukraine was involved in, and the Russian poisoning of a previous one? Or was that OK, because Russia is next door to Ukraine?

But I see as much or more evidence of US meddling around the world than of Russian; and I think the rest of the world does, too.

which, while you're not happy with it, doesn't concern you, then.

No, the world doesn't agree with you. They aren't OK with murder.

People are roughly split in their ratings of Joe Biden: Across 34 countries, a median of 43% trust him to do the right thing regarding world affairs, while 46% do not. Ratings of Emmanuel Macron are similarly divided.
A median of 28% have confidence in Donald Trump. And roughly a quarter trust Xi Jinping to do the right thing in world affairs.
Vladimir Putin receives the lowest ratings globally, and views of the Russian leader are especially negative in Europe.



https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/comparing-confidence-in-macron-putin-and-xi-to-ratings-of-biden-and-trump/

which makes continued conversation too difficult to pursue.

Link to tweet