In this age of Twitter it’s sometimes tempting to try and find the most jolting, attention getting one liner — and then live to regret it. In this case, Time’s Michael Grunwald did both. And you don’t have to be a fan of Wikileak’s Julian Assange to find it surprising or distasteful:
A TIME magazine reporter caused ire on Twitter Saturday night when he said that he “can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Michael Grunwald’s tweet, since deleted, was quickly met with outrage and bewilderment. Glenn Greenwald, who recently broke several revelations about NSA surveillance programs based on documents provided to him by leaker Edward Snowden, was particularly vocal in expressing his disgust with Grunwald’s statement.
Go the link to read some of the exchanges of Tweets — and they are lively.
The bigger issue, really, is once again the disintegration of previous reporting standards. Once upon a time it would unthinkable that a reporter would write — let alone say — something like that in public, even if it was a humorous throw away line. It was almost an obsession for some reporters and journalists not to appear to be taking sides and if that wasn’t possible, at least not to appear harsh or in the same category as partisans. This kind of tweets can also complicate a reporter’s future work: some of the people he may wish to use as sources in the future might be more hesitant to open up for him.
And, yes, it could have just been a case of a one liner so good he simply had to use it. But that doesn’t negate to the damage it does to his potential future sources.
But we have seen this now for a few years: the traditional goal of trying to remain or at the very least appear above it all has quickly fallen by the wayside — not everywhere, but it is falling.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.