Julian Assange To Host Talk Show On Russia Today
Julian Assange: Establishment outsider. Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Talk show host? Apparently so. The Australian founder of controversial website WikiLeaks will be at the helm of “The World Tomorrow,” a series comprised of 10 interviews with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries,” to air in March.
Exclusive rights to the series were picked up yesterday by Russia Today, an English-language television channel which the Guardianhas called “the Kremlin’s English language propaganda arm… that has given voice to a thousand anti-western conspiracy theories, while avoiding criticism of the hand that feeds it.” Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today’s editor-in-chief, told Reuters Moscow that the network is counting on the show’s success. She also drew a few strained parallels between RT (which has featured pundits who argue that the Arab Spring was instigated by Free Masons) and Assange: “Everything we do on the air is different from the English-language mainstream, that is something we have in common with Assange.”
Filming has already started in Britain, where Assange is currently living under house arrest for allegedly sexually assaulting two women in Sweden last year.
Watch Nicholas Lemann, the Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a former New Yorker staff writer discuss how journalists decide what news stories the press chooses to cover. “Rightly or wrongly, the press does self-restrain,” he says:
