Fighting Fake News, 2/6/19; Trump's Criminalizing of Journalism; Death Taxes a Liberal calling card started by Frydenberg

Trump’s Charges Against Julian Assange Would Effectively Criminalize Investigative Journalism

Ever since the Pentagon Papers case, an Espionage Act loophole has been waiting for a president thuggish enough to make use of it. 
It is small comfort to Assange, in his maximum-security detention cell, that there is—thanks to the Trump administration’s latest political attack on the institution of independent journalism—at least a fighting chance that this prosecution will fail before it gets started. But for that to happen, it will take vigorous and persistent articulation by journalists and our allies of what’s at stake. If the Trump administration can transform the Espionage Act into a weapon against muckraking publishers, the Pentagon Papers triumph of 1971 will fade overnight into a threadbare memory of press freedom lost.
Bruce Shapiro

 

Australia votes

With one click, the Liberals inadvertently unleashed the ultimate election scare campaign

By election eve, for every person typing “retiree tax” into Google there, 30 were searching the term “death tax”.

 A LIARS PARADISE

How the death tax claim went from Shorten to social media

The death tax claim made the transition from Frydenberg’s press release to the world of Facebook via two Queensland Liberal National Party MPs.
On January 31, Senator Ian Macdonald pasted part of the release onto a post headlined “Death Taxes under a Shorten government!”. It was shared 280 times.
A week later, conservative backbencher George Christensen shared a photo of a seven-month-old article about the ACTU endorsing an inheritance tax, with the caption: “Is Labor going to bring in a death tax as their union bosses want them to do?” That was shared more than 2000 times. Christensen’s post landed on at least a dozen conservative Facebook pages that cumulatively boast more than 200,000 followers.

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