From allies to enemies: how ‘The Guardian’ fell out with Assange
…Assange had come to threaten the newspaper with legal action if it went ahead with plans to run stories based on the vast quantity of US government material leaked to his website.
The relationship between Assange and the newspaper had by this point descended into one that involved “distrust and anger”, becoming so acrimonious that the WikiLeaks founder claimed it had breached an agreement on the publication of the data which he saw as his own.
In a detailed account of the tensions, Vanity Fair magazine reports that Assange argued that “he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released”