Assange calls UK press most 'credit-stealing, credit-whoring, backstabbing industry'

London, Nov 28 (ANI): Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks, has launched a scornful attack on British journalism, calling it the most 'credit-stealing, credit-whoring, backstabbing industry' he has ever seen.

According to The Independent, Assange's remarks reveal the depth of distrust between him and senior journalists at The Guardian newspaper, with whom he fell out over an agreement to publish thousands of secret US diplomatic cables alongside two other international newspapers last year.

According to the report, a documentary to be aired soon will reveal how a pact to publish the contents of more than 75,000 leaked US cables in a deal between The Guardian, The New York Times and Germany's Der Spiegel went interminably sour leading to bitter fallouts with all three newspapers.

In the film, Assange brands The Guardian's David Leigh as 'deplorable' and retaliates at his colleague, Nick Davies, who brands Assange an 'extraordinarily dishonest man'.

WikiLeaks earlier sparked an international diplomatic crisis especially after the broken pact between the papers led to a further batch of cables alleged to include the names of Afghan informers, making them vulnerable to reprisals.

In a rare admission in the film, Assange conceded it was a "regrettable oversight", but the ultimate blame still remained with the US military and that information "should never have been included, and falsely classified".

According to the report, the film, 'True Stories: WikiLeaks', also reveals the animosity he harboured towards The New York Times after it threatened to inform the White House of the contents of some of the cables.

"Once a media group is powerful for long enough, it starts to enter into a relationship with other powerful groups, because other powerful groups seek its favour, seek to makes deals with it and the individuals who run it," Assange says in the film.

"It stops seeing itself as a group that holds powerful groups to account and starts seeing itself as part of the social network of the elite. That's why fundamentally mainstream media cannot be trusted," he adds. (ANI)