The Endgame: Assange running low on support - and options
If Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa grants Julian Assange his asylum plea, the Wikileaks founder may escape prosecution in the United States indefinitely. But by holing up in Ecuador’s embassy in the United Kingdom, Assange has already sacrificed the one thing that’s made him a household name — his credibility
By KEVIN BLOOM
... “I have decided to hold out an olive-branch to our overworked detractors,” Assange stated in the release, “by writing higher quality smears for them” ...
that’s exactly what the mainstream Western media said about Assange and Wikileaks in the days following the show’s debut, although in slightly less blatant terms. While Assange, as he did in the press release, would no doubt have boiled the comparatively restrained language down to a journalistic “lack of imagination,” he was still dead-on: the big media organisations called him out for being a hypocrite.
Nevertheless, given what’s happened in the last week, the question must once more be asked—if Assange is able to confidently and correctly predict a media backlash that labels him one thing or another, does this mean he isn’t what the label says he is? ...
Yet it’s undeniable by now that Assange is scraping the bottom of the sympathy barrel. The world’s most powerful English-medium newspaper brands, former supporters of his including the New York Times and the Guardian, have turned on him for good reason—the values that he once held dear, the principles of openness and transparency that he once espoused, have been rendered empty by his latest choice of ally.
http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-06-25-the-endgame-assange-running-low-on-support-and-options
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