Julian Assange: Vaughan Smith Is No Michael Moore

JULIAN Assange will be spending Christmas at Ellingham Hall, Suffolk, where Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith lives and shoots.

In “The world’s most wanted house guest – Why I’m sheltering Julian Assange”, Smith tells Independent readers why he is allowing Assange to bed down at his Georgian pile.

The cynic sits up and says, well, it’s all great publicity for the Mr Vaughan and his Frontline Club. Jemima Khan and Michael Moore have inserted themselves into the story. Assange has rich celebrity mates keen to be on the inside. Vaughan is a journalist of independent means sidling up to the rock star.

But Vaughan has credibility. As a skilled journalist, he has been consistently behind Assange, and is bang on when he writes:

I ponder the disservice to Julian done by the media. With their stockings stuffed by WikiLeaks they dehumanise him with images printed and screened of a cold, calculating Machiavelli pulling strings from secret hideouts. The main hideout, of course, being the Frontline Club, where many of them have interviewed him.

That’s right. Wikileaks is a great news source for a lazy media, so supine that the Guardian asks its own readers to tell it what to look for in the Wikileaks leaked cables it had acquired – and then conjures up a pisspoor front-page story on Madeleine McCann, so hitting its keyword quota.

Assange and his Wikileaks provided a conduit for the raw material. It’s up to the good journalist to interpret the data and protect their source…