Julian Assange won two victories in London today. First, of course, there was the matter of his bail, which was granted by a British judge -- pending an appeal by the Swedish government, which wants to extradite Assange on sexual assault charges. The Wikileaks founder surrendered himself to police a week ago, and has been in jail since.
His second victory, however, may have been more important, if less tangible. I witnessed it a few minutes before 3:30 p.m., Greenwich mean time, outside the Westminster Magistrates' Court, where I was uncomfortably squeezed amid dozens of news photographers, reporters, and producers from around the world -- representatives of the old media in all its myriad forms. Suddenly a great whooping went up from a huddle of the Assange faithful across the street, penned in by wary police officers and metal barricades."He got bail!" someone shouted.
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This was the news everyone had been waiting for -- and it came not from any of the media organizations camped outside the courthouse perimeter, but from one of the twentysomething demonstrators following the court proceedings via Twitter on a mobile phone. As soon as the cheers quieted, a TV newsman turned to face the camera and relayed the news, citing Twitter as his source. The implication couldn't have been clearer if Assange himself had scripted it: The WikiLeaks model of information distribution -- an unmediated firehose, arriving via many outlets and with zero vetting -- had triumphed. The old media, as it had been since WikiLeaks first began dumping heaps of U.S. government documents into the public domain this summer, was adrift in a world suddenly run by computer science majors.
I had arrived at the courthouse -- arguably the least architecturally impressive one in London, located between Westminster Cathedral and the Thames -- a few minutes after noon to find the hearing room already packed. "You could do something to get extradited," a television cameraman cheerfully suggested, when I asked how to get inside. "Or show up drunk." The press photographers, with their cigarettes, tiny coffee cups, and North Face jackets, lined up in the middle of Horseferry Road, facing the courthouse. They were joined at first by just a handful of protesters; many more arrived later, after the police finished barricading both sides of the road, segregating the press on the north side from the protest on the south side.
Aside from the few protesters who'd shown up early, the dozens of reporters on hand had no one to interview and no pictures to take. Out of habit, the journalists shoved and jostled one another. It was, as one newswoman put it, "a shit fight -- a quality shit fight." Throughout the afternoon, I watched TV reporters perform multiple takes of the same stand-up, dutifully reporting the non-news in various languages. The sign-offs, invariably, went something like this: "One thing is clear: the intense worldwide media interest in the case of Julian Assange will continue. His fate, however, is unknown."
There was some jealous grumbling that the Sunshine Coast Daily, a 22,000-circulation paper in Queensland, Australia, had scooped the world by publishing Assange's statement from jail. Rubbing salt in the wound, one of the paper's reporters had apparently accompanied Assange's mother into the courtroom. Outside, everyone else waited amid the millions of dollars of broadcasting equipment. "This is really when you want to have Twitter," a TV reporter said to her camera-toting colleague. "To know what's going on."
In the information-starved environment of a media scrum, the arrival of an important-looking outsider can spark a stampede. Twice I was nearly crushed by the camera mob as it swarmed around a person entering the courtroom. Once, I recognized the face at the center of the scrum: John Pilger, the documentary filmmaker who has made himself an apostle of Assange's information revolution. ("That mindset that only authority can really determine the truth on the news, that's a form of embedding that really now has to change," he told a reporter elsewhere on Tuesday.) It was an odd sight: News organizations that could no longer properly fund a bureau in Baghdad throwing their limited resources at a mad scramble for soundbites from a man predicting their extinction.
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