The two most consequential Australians in history are surely Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange. Germaine Greer would come a distant third.

Unsurprisingly, Assange and Murdoch have gained their notoriety through journalism and the media. More surprising – but significant – is the fact both of them could be described as libertarians.

Assange emerged from the free software, cypherpunk movement of the 1990s, which saw the great question of the times as being how a free internet and an uncensored flow of information could lead to the triumph of privacy and personal freedom over an oppressive state.

When he founded WikiLeaks, he argued it would pressure “unaccountable and secretive institutions … to act ethically”. He embraced the idea the state – at least the surveillance state – could not survive mass-scale “principled leaking”. He was an anarchist.

Murdoch, on the other hand, began as a “zealous Laborite” according to his father, Keith. He soon dropped his socialist ideas but remained anti-establishment. In 1999 he told journalist William Shawcross that he identified as a libertarian. That meant “as much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible”.

Murdoch had limits, though. He added: “I’m not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit.” Libertarian, then, but not an anarchist.

Perhaps that difference is why Murdoch has become part of the establishment and a king-maker within it, whereas Assange is a convicted felon and has spent five years in jail.

Some of the discussion about Assange’s guilty plea concerns the question of whether or not he is a journalist.

It’s an arid debate, which overlooks the obvious truth: he and the technological revolutions of which he is part have changed journalism, forever.

Assange registered the domain name for WikiLeaks in 2006 – the same year Twitter was invented, and Facebook opened itself for the public to use. They made the previous innovation of blogging........

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