Julian Assange: Even The Bigots Are Backing Him

Promotion of the charges being levelled against Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, and intense scrutiny over their integrity has recently emerged from an unlikely source – British rightwing tabloid, The Daily Mail.


 Known across the nation for its bare faced bigotry, shameless ignorance, blistering disdain towards open-minded youngsters and chronic lack of any sense of style, the Daily Mail is truly the last newspaper one would expect to indirectly assist the plight of an individual like Assange. When it isn’t waxing lyrical about the joys of casual racism and waging wars in Middle Eastern countries, one is likely to find the Daily Mail pouring vitriol over liberal politicians and anyone who doesn’t have a room temperature view. Yet nevertheless such prejudice, it would seem, has been lifted in favour of battling the common enemy of freedom of the speech. Or has it?


 All publicity, one hears over and over again, is good publicity. When the Daily Mail runs Assange’s trial on the front page of their paper, instead of bitching about middle class, jumped up student protestors, it makes quite a profound statement regardless of what the text in the columns might say about Assange as a person. It says, of course, that this is a story worth covering and indeed the unsavoury circumstances surrounding Assange’s nebulous rape allegations also deserve critical analysis – should Mail reporters be capable of such a thing, of course. One must compare recent pages of other papers associated with the right to understand the magnitude of this – the Telegraph and the Times avoid even mentioning Assange’s name where possible, and seem crippled with fear at the prospect of transgressing against the views of the current politician’s power. Of course, this would be rather a difficult thing to do anyway when giving head to the swine under their desks.

But let’s not fall in love with the editor of the Mail just yet. One could certainly argue that the Mail’s fascination with Assange actually has nothing to do with his achievements as a political watchdog, and therefore their indirect support of him through exposure loses much of its relevance. On the contrary, it’s the sensation of the story which no doubt gets some chubby copy editor’s pulse pumping, as he wheezes and sweats over the prospect of a new, sordid exciting public figure to ejaculate over. A recent article in the Mail uses their trademark schoolboy humour to poke fun rather affectionately at Assange’s underground hideout, likening it to the super secret base of a villain from a Bond film. Nauseating clichés aside, the Mail probably just succeeded this time in doing what it usually does best – twisting anything of tangible merit into a grotesque circus of parochialism.