Wikileaks chief Julian Assange slammed the New York Times in October for the paper's critical front-page profile of him.That's presumably one of the reasons that the Times -- which received hundreds of thousands of secret Afghanistan and Iraq documents from WikiLeaks -- was shut out when WikiLeaks provided 250,000 State Department cables to several news outlets for publication in November. The Times ended up getting its documents from The Guardian.
But now Assange is taking issue with The Guardian's coverage of him. So could the British paper be shut out next?
David Leigh, The Guardian's investigations editor, told The Cutline that he doesn't want "to be too critical of Julian because he's been under a lot of strain lately."
However, Leigh added that "it seems he's going to war with just about everyone at the moment."
Assange's "war" with The Guardian landed on the front page of Tuesday's Times of London (shown above), a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that, so far, hasn't been on the receiving end of any of WikiLeaks' trove of classified documents. (The Times of London article is behind a paywall, but many of the details have already leaked out.)
In the article, Assange claims that The Guardian tarnished his reputation by publishing new details Friday about the rape and sexual assault allegations made against him in Sweden, based on a leaked police report.
The Times reports that Assange is "particularly angry with Nick Davies" — the article's author — for "selectively publishing" damaging allegations from the 68-page report. Davies isn't just any reporter covering WikiLeaks; he's said to be a friend of Assange and also helped broker the original agreement to provide leaked cables to The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel. (Davies could not be reached for comment.)
Assange said the leak of the Swedish police report "was clearly designed to undermine my bail application." He added: "Someone in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison."
Leigh defended Davies on Twitter Monday night, suggesting that The Guardian reporter actually kept out specific details from the police report while publishing what was deemed necessary for the story. That runs counter to Assange's view that The Guardian treated him unfairly in how the paper covered the allegations.
"Nick left out a lot of graphic and damaging material in the allegations because he thought it would be too cruel to publish them," Leigh said by phone.
Assange, who has not yet been charged with a crime, is expected to eventually return to Sweden to answer questions about the charges. Assange has called the allegations part of a "smear campaign" against him and, by extension, WikiLeaks, as the organization is being targeted by the U.S. government.
It may seem ironic that the WikiLeaks founder would criticize The Guardian for publishing leaked information, but in an interview with the BBC, Assange made a distinction between what he does and what's been leaked about him.
"We are an organization that does not promote leaking," Assange said. "We're an organization that promotes justice … that promotes justice through the mechanism of transparency and journalism."
Assange once more called the Swedish prosecution a trumped-up effort to tarnish him and WikiLeaks. "When a powerful organization that has internal policies that is meant to be creating and following the law, i.e. Swedish prosecution's judicial system, abuses its own regulation and its own position to attack an individual," he said, "that is an abuse of power."
Although he's long maintained his innocence in interviews, Assange has refused to respond to some specific questions relating to the allegations. Assange recently walked out of an ABC News interview and called the reporter a "tabloid schmuck" for bringing up certain details in the allegations.
It remains to be seen how The Guardian's recent story affects the long-term relationship between Assange and the British paper, which also continues to publish articles based on the cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables.
Alexi Mostrous, the Times of London reporter who sat down with Assange, balked at the notion that the WikiLeaks chief now has an exclusive agreement with his paper.
"This stuff about #assange signing 'exclusively' for the times is totally, categorically, crap," Mostrous wrote on Twitter. "No deal, just an interview.
Michael Calderone @'Yahoo'
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