Justice & Law Quote by Julian Assange

Assange’s line is built to feel like an obvious scandal you’ve somehow been trained to accept. By reaching for an analogy as blunt as “the police reporting on the police,” he collapses a sprawling critique of media incentives into a single image of circular accountability: the investigator and the investigated sharing the same badge. The intent isn’t to nitpick bias; it’s to delegitimize a whole chain of information before the audience even reaches the facts.

“Starts very early” is the key pressure point. He’s not alleging a few bad headlines at the end of the pipeline; he’s accusing the system at the source - selection, access, framing - where stories are born. That phrasing implies structural capture: reporters reliant on official briefings, editors optimizing for relationships and reputation, institutions rewarding conformity over friction. Corruption here isn’t a bribe; it’s dependency masquerading as professionalism.

The subtext is also personal and tactical. Assange’s public brand, forged in the WikiLeaks era, depends on positioning mainstream journalism as too entangled to confront state power without leaks as an external shock. If the media is structurally incapable of adversarial scrutiny, then his methods - radical transparency, document dumps, bypassing gatekeepers - look less like provocation and more like a necessary corrective.

Culturally, the analogy lands because it rhymes with the post-9/11 and post-Snowden mood: surveillance states expanding, press access becoming a currency, and “national security” functioning as a narrative shield. Assange is betting that readers already feel the closed loop; he’s just giving it a name that sticks.