node created 2019/09/29
1. Start with the set of all potentially serious journalists.

2. Filter out the ones who put forth arguments which downplay the dangers to the press of prosecuting Assange.

3. Filter out the ones who don't explicitly argue against prosecuting Assange on 1st Amendment grounds.

Follow the small group that survives #3 to get a variety of (probably) high-quality perspectives from serious journalists.
It really is the central view of, certainly, American and British media stars, that when, especially people with medals on their chests, who are called generals, but also high-ranking officials in the government, make claims, that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence, and that it's almost immoral to call them into question, or to question their veracity.
This is the danger of the "dark age of journalism", as it has been called. The training of the old Reuters reporter is replaced by one of political and corporate collusion. The separation between newsrooms and public relations agencies growing ever thinner as reporters rush to fill space at all costs, regardless of truth. [..] The collapse of journalism combined with complex, fast-changing technology offers a wealth of opportunity for propagandists. In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.
Seeing the Tea Party protests as oligarch theater was the easy part. What we didn't bargain for was how different the American ecosystem is from Russia's: Here, if your reporting causes some serious butt-hurt on powerful interests and they fight back with their PR machine, you can be sure that you will be abandoned by all your journalist "colleagues" and your liberal "comrades." One whiff of gunpowder, and those folks are like peasants melting into the countryside.