This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 4th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There's a reason journalists have been bristling at some of the charges now facing

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The charges implicate their own profession.

Patrick Edington is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

We spoke yesterday.

So the unfortunate fact that you note in a recent op-ed is that once you are making

these determinations about methods used to gather information

and then disseminating that information to the public, you're implicating a lot of fairly standard journalistic

methods.

We should be careful to separate some of these particular methods here from others.

But broadly speaking, a lot of the things

that he's accused of doing that are considered

to be espionage are what reporters do all the time.

Good reporters.

Yes.

Reputable reporters, let's just use some names like Jim Rison,

formerly at the New York Times now at the Intercept or John Landay at Reuters or you know whoever and this what I

also think is interesting about the indictment is that they name Assange the

person they don't name WikiLeaks and I didn't get a chance to

didn't quite have the space in this Orange County Register op-ed to get into all the

...