Crowley Tweets and Resigns

While the Japan crisis and the situation in the Middle East have been monopolizing the news media, most Foreign Policy Magazine and the New York Times also ran a story about Philip Crowley’s twitter comments on these current events. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, posted “we’ve been watching a hopeful #tsunami sweep across the Middle East. Now we’re seeing a tsunami of a different kind sweep across Japan” to his twitter account and then, after objections were raised about its sensitivity to tsunami survivors, he deleted it.
I was first interested in this story because it seemed like one of the first times a public official was lambasted for an inappropriate tweet. Most public officials that have a twitter account often have very polished, politically correct tweets that rarely express genuine opinion. I think this story was being used to draw more attention to Crowley comments about the detainment of Bradley Manning, the soldier who is charged with leaking confidential U.S. documents to WikiLeaks. When framing this story, both newspapers seems to be focusing on the scandal/ conflict aspect, since “scandals... have become the stuff of news in the new media age," (Cohen, 95). In a follow up story, after Crowley resigned, the New York Times also reported that “Crowley had a rocky tenure at the State Department” and “[failed] to develop close tie to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton”. Both articles cited qualified sources, like BCC and State Department Officials, yet did not take a stance on whether Crowley’s departure was justified.