Gavin MacFadyen, right, an investigative
journalist and documentarian, with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in
2011. Credit John Stillwell/Press Association
Gavin MacFadyen, an American investigative
journalist who became an early mentor and defender of the founder of WikiLeaks,
Julian Assange, died on Saturday in London, where he lived and spent much of
his professional life. He was 76.
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Susan
Benn, said.
Since the 1970s, Mr. MacFadyen produced and
directed scores of television documentaries on a wide range of subjects,
including neo-Nazi violence, child labor, nuclear proliferation and industrial
accidents. Sometimes he worked in disguise.
He also co-founded the nonprofit Center for
Investigative Journalism in London in 2003, a training program in skeptical
reporting, and WhistleblowersUK, a support group for tipsters. He was a
director of WikiLeaks and, with his wife and another journalist, John Pilger,
formed the Julian Assange Legal Defense Committee.
Mr. Assange, an Australian computer
programmer, founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and published millions of secret
documents, many supplied by Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence
analyst. Mr. Assange has been under investigation by the American government and
is wanted for questioning about rape allegations in Sweden. He has found refuge
in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition.
Immediately after Mr. MacFadyen’s death,
WikiLeaks issued this Twitter post: “Gavin Macfadyen, beloved director of WikiLeaks,
now takes his fists and his fight to battle God. Sock it to him, forever,
Gavin.” It was signed “JA.”
In his book “WikiLeaks: News in the Networked
Era” (2012), Charlie Beckett wrote that Mr. MacFadyen “was a core WikiLeaks
supporter who had offered the services of interns, facilities and even on
occasion his sofa to the team.” Mr. Assange moved into Mr. MacFadyen’s London
townhouse in 2010, bringing with him only three pairs of socks.
Elaine Potter, a philanthropist and
co-founder of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in London, said Mr.
MacFadyen had been driven by “passion, politics and curiosity.”
“He recognized the significance of WikiLeaks
and made contact from the moment they arrived on the internet,” she said. “He
became obsessed with providing support for whistle-blowers.”
Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks have been thrust
into the spotlight in recent months by the release of thousands of Democratic
National Committee emails amid suspicions by United States officials that the
files were hacked by the Russian government, possibly to influence the American
elections.
But Mr. MacFadyen maintained that Western
news organizations had uncritically published material provided by the Central
Intelligence Agency and that the fundamental question was whether the
information was true and in the public interest, rather than its source.
“His commitment to exposing the true nature
of power was his life force,” Ms. Benn, his wife, said. “He spearheaded the
creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for
ethical and hard-hitting reporting.”
She added: “Gavin worked tirelessly to hold
power to account. He once said, ‘Good journalism is always political
journalism.’”
Mr. MacFadyen was born Gavin Hall Galter on
Jan. 1, 1940, in Greeley, Colo., and grew up in Chicago. He never knew his
father, and he adopted the surname of his stepfather, a medical researcher. His
mother was a pianist.
He worked as a union organizer and
demonstrated for civil rights before moving to Britain, where he graduated from
the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
Afterward, he created a documentary film
group to chronicle the political turmoil in the United States during the late
1960s for the BBC, covering anti-Vietnam War protests, race riots and the
police clash with demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in 1968.
He went on to cover the war in Nicaragua
between the right-wing contra rebels and the Marxist Sandinista government in
the 1980s.
Collaborating with the director Michael Mann,
he played Boreksco, a crooked police officer, in Mr. Mann’s 1981 debut feature
film, “Thief,” and was a technical adviser to “The Insider,” Mr. Mann’s 1999
film about Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco company whistle-blower, starring Russell
Crowe and Al Pacino.
He produced documentaries for the BBC,
Granada Television and ABC-TV and for Frontline on PBS. He was a visiting
professor at City, University of London.
In addition to Ms. Benn, he is survived by a
son, Michael, from his first marriage, to Virginia Daum, which ended in
divorce; three stepdaughters, Sarah Saunders, Deborah Ramsay and Samantha
McLean; and six grandchildren.
In an interview with Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands in 2009, Mr. MacFadyen drew a distinction between
being a witness and bearing witness, and defined a whistle-blower or an
informer as someone who values the truth because it will affect the future.
“The wealthy and powerful often are unhappy
about telling the truth,” he said. “There is a famous story that if you give a
poor man on the street a dollar, you’re considered a good Christian, but if you
ask, ‘Why is that man poor?’ you’ll go to prison.”
Journalism, he suggested, was essentially
pursuing answers to basic questions: “A building has blown up. Great. We need
to know that — very important. Who did it? Why did it blow up? What are the
consequences? Who was killed? Who benefits from this? Those are the questions I
want to ask.”
He added: “The more we know, the more we can
control an event or stop those events. To understand the events, not to cry,
not to laugh, but to understand.”
A version of this article appears in print on
October 28, 2016, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Gavin
MacFadyen, Mentor and Defender Of WikiLeaks’s Founder, Is Dead at 76.
No comments:
Post a Comment