Michael Grunwald is a reporter for Time magazine. He recently sent out a tweet that said, “I can’t wait to write a defense of a drone strike that takes out Julian Assange”.
He has since deleted the tweet but nothing even truly disappears in the internet. In the face of a backlash he apologized for the tweet calling it ‘dumb’ but he has a long history of supporting drone strikes attacking those who are concerned about civil liberties.
One of the things that WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden have done is expose how much the mainstream media has been co-opted by the government and has adopted an authoritarian mindset, even to the extent of using government-approved euphemisms such as ‘takes out’ instead of the more accurate ‘kills’ or ‘murders’. The fact that these outlets are breaking much more important news that the traditional media seems to be driving them crazy.
As Glenn Greenwald said, “Things like this make you not just understand, but celebrate, the failings of large media outlets – TIME edition.”
Will that tweet be mentioned in Grunwald’s obituary?
I can’t wait to see!
Hey, that’s a pretty funny tweet! Because, since Anwar Al-Awlaki, (among other things) a blogger, youtuber, and faceboker, probably considered himself a “journalist” too. So we know it’s open season on journalists. What an asshole.
And not just an asshole, a cowardly asshole. If he really meant it, he’d have left it hanging out there for everyone to see.
Mano -- I think an important point that you should consider adding to this post is that Grunwald originally deleted the tweet only because “….my main problem with this is it gives Assange supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in…”.
It wasn’t a simple matter that he reconsidered and deleted the tweet. He only called it dumb after the sheer volume of backlash made it clear that it could affect his career…
Different country, same principle.