The Trump administration recently filed new charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The charges fall under the 1917 Espionage Act and are connected to the 2010 publication of secret documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Wikileaks also published secret documents related to diplomatic communications regarding dozens of nations.
In a piece for the Washington Post, commentator Glenn Greenwald writes that “…the Trump administration is aggressively and explicitly seeking to obliterate the last reliable buffer protecting journalism in the United States from being criminalized.”
The Shop Talk panelists this week discuss the essay by Greenwald, who’s a well-known journalist and one of the co-founding editors of The Intercept.
The panelists also debate whether Assange’s work should be considered journalism – and whether that matters when it comes to protecting investigative work.
Shop Talk is a weekly panel discussion about journalism issues. This week’s program featured Will Buss, who teaches in the Department of Broadcasting and Journalism at Western Illinois University and advises the student editors at the Western Courier; Patrick Johnson, who teaches in the Department of Broadcasting and Journalism at WIU and advises Western’s student radio station WIUS/The Dog; and TSPR News Director Rich Egger.
