irwinmathewidonohoe See, Matthew Keys allowed a news site to be hacked for no journalistic purpose and with no journalistic result and I saw plenty of people at the time stand up for him being a journalist, so I think by that standard Assange was acting as a journalist, even more so.
irwinmathewidonohoe Personally I think Keys should have had his journalist attribution as revoked as these things get btw (tho it hasn't worked that way), I agree he was incorrectly charged. That said, I think as a minimum standard, doing journalism is enough reason to call a person a journalist.
irwinmathewidonohoe But my point is that many of the people who *very reasonably* dislike Assange for being awful, would have stood up for Keys simply because they liked him more. I think Assange is a disaster of a human, and if he was a journalist he isn't now, but the case against him is shit.
irwinmathewidonohoe Frankly, the real problem is that there are a lot of awful things Assange has done that are unethical but not illegal that we don't really have a legal structure to deal with, and even if we did I wouldn't trust Trump to do it.
irwinmathewidonohoe But on this particular charge, if we want to decide how we should feel about it and react to it based on if he was a journalist at the time: the answer is yes we should.