It has been four years this week since Julian Assange was imprisoned in London’s Belmarsh Prison, held in a legal battle over his extradition to the US on espionage charges for publishing classified military information. Although the Trump Administration brought the charges against the Australian-born Assange, the Biden Administration has indicated it plans to pursue…
BY GEORGE SALAMON / Just this past Sunday journalism’s unceasing debate on anonymous sources reared its head again. In the October 13 Sunday Review section of The New York Times Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s fifth public editor, wrote about “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources.” Dan Okrent, first public editor from 2003 to 2005, confronted the same issue during his tenure. Even then, novelist and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen had already had enough: “…the customary righteousness, disingenuousness, futility and wonky tedium of such debates are for me almost unbearable.”