Critics jab Pentagon press secretary’s ruined Easter
Published: April 27, 2011
WASHINGTON – Careful the things you tweet; new media critics will listen.
A bit of Easter Sunday snark tweeted by Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, a Twitter neophyte, has drawn some guffaws from the international blogosphere. Morrell’s reaction to late-breaking Sunday news reports on a Wikileaks dump of classified information, this time about the treatment of nearly every Guantanamo prisoner since 2002, did not go unnoticed.
Morrell tweeted on Monday, “Thx to Wikileaks we spent Easter weekend dealing w/NYT & other news orgs publishing leaked classified GTMO docs"
“The real victims so often get ignored,” Salon’s Natasha Lennard wrote that day, tongue firmly in cheek. “Here we were, concerned about the inmates with psychotic illnesses, the senile old men and the children detained at Guantanamo Bay, and not once did we think about what Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell had to sacrifice because of the Guantanamo Files leaks: his Easter weekend.”
Even the Aussies noticed. The blog Crikey, on Wednesday, wrote, “His bitching perfectly sums up the mindset behind Guantanamo, the laziness, the reflexive secrecy, the incapacity to comprehend how profoundly both the Bush and Obama Administrations [sic] – the latter having broken its promise to close the facility – have abandoned any sense of duty toward basic rights.”
Morrell is new to Twitter, with just 54 posts since joining up Feb. 16. But with 4,458 followers and counting, there’s a wide audience for every word the Pentagon – and Morrell – utters.
Mediate, a blog on news media, wrote, “So why shouldn’t his tweets sound just like anyone else’s? On the other hand, the guy’s the Press Secretary for the Pentagon! His public communications shouldn’t sound like a pissy office drone who has to work late!”
Luckily, that tweet will be saved forever by the Library of Congress.
