Yearning for Assassination of Julian Assange Puts "Journalist" Under Fire

You can delete the tweet, just not always the message.

Michael Grunwald, Time magazine’s senior national correspondent, has come under enormous fire this weekend for declaring his support for the extrajudicial murder of Wikileaks‘ publisher and embattled journalist Julian Assange.

In what is perhaps the most singular and noxious example yet of how establishment media figures express their contempt for those journalists who have chosen to challenge government and corporate power as oppose to coddling that authority, Grunwald tweeted:

Though Grunwald deleted the original tweet—after someone pointed out, according to the Huffington Post, how it would “only encourage Assange supporters”—it was too late to stem the fallout.

An archived version of the original tweet and the responses and retweets it generated are available here.

Shortly after it was deleted, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald—himself the target of similar vitriol from establishment “journalists”—tweeted:

Wikileaks also jumped into the debate, calling for Grunwald’s dismissal and using social media to call out Time for the behavior of their correspondent*:

And Greenwald, referring to his being called “an activist” and “not a journalist” by numerous mainstream news outlets and pundits due to his hard-hitting role as commentator on issues like civil liberties, Bush era crimes, and government/media complicity over the years, tweeted this about Grunwald’s comments:

In the aftermath of early reporting by Greenwald based on NSA documents released to him by Edward Snowden this past June, NBC host of Meet the Press David Gregory famously asked the Guardian journalist if he himself should be prosecuted for “aiding and abetting” Snowden because he met with him in Hong Kong to interview the whistleblower and discuss the NSA documents and the revelations they contained.