Julian Assange

• I WRITE to thank you for publishing Tim Dawson’s piece, (New questions on Assange and the CIA, October 21).

This Forum, written by an ex-president of the National Union of Journalists, highlighted the Central Intelligence Agency’s despicable plans, in the summer of 2017, to either kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.

I echo the praise of Sebastian Crewe for your newspaper (in the Letters pages of the same issue). We gave up our subscription to The Guardian several months ago because of its (almost) complete failure to cover the previous phase of Assange’s extradition hearings.

I had read The Guardian since my adolescence; my partner switched to it after The Times – which he’s read since his childhood – was taken over by Rupert Murdoch.

Newspapers such as yours are essential to a properly functioning democracy which the United Kingdom in my opinion no longer is, largely because of the non-reporting or distorted reporting of vitally important news in the so-called mainstream press, and in the BBC.

I wonder why the current NUJ president is, as far as I can tell, silent about the Assange hearings and their significance to democracy?

RACHEL GOULD, WC1