WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - currently under house arrest - promises a notorious first guest for his talk show with the news channel RT (DStv 405) which just announced that Julian Assange's brand-new interview show, The World Tomorrow, will start this Tuesday (17 April) at 13:30 (South African time).
ALSO READ: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange getting his own TV show, The World Tomorrow, on RT from March.
MultiChoice which carries RT, neither include the channel in online listings nor provide an electronic programme guide (EPG) on DStv (which makes the recording of specific shows and setting reminders impossible) - but RT in Russia tells me The World Tomorrow will debut at 13:30 (South African time) on Tuesday [07:30 in New York; 21:30 in Sydney].
RT will also make full episodes of The World Tomorrow available online, as well as behind-the-scenes content on the official The World Tomorrow website.
Instead of the initially announced 10 episodes there will now be 12 half hour episodes of The World Tomorrow with several repeats of every weekly episode. 17 April is significant for Julian Assange since it marks the 500th day of "the international blockade on WikiLeaks funding".
The World Tomorrow is recorded in London in a secret location where Julian Assange is holed up who's been under house arrest for over a year without being officially charged, awaiting a decision on possible extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault.
Julian Assange will be interviewing people who he says is ''shaping the global agenda of tomorrow". Julian Assange guests will include "figures who normally simply would not be given a voice on TV at all. What is fair to say is that the majority of what they have said to me, they could not say on a mainstream TV network."
"500 days now I've been detained without charge. But that hasn't stopped us. We're on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow,'' he says.
Julian Assange also explains why he chose RT as the channel on which to do his first TV show. "A lot of the things that we have been trying to report have not been carried accurately in the mainstream press. There are many, many fine exceptions but when we look at international networks there's really only two that are worth speaking about and that's RT and Al Jazeera."
"We do not want to kill the buzz and the intrigue by revealing the name of the first guest," says Margarita Simonyan, RT editor-in-chief in a just-issued press release. "But I have no doubts that this particular guest and this interview will lead to calls to shut us down from some especially hawkish personalities who have little respect for freedom of speech."
Here is the official promo of The World Tomorrow:
