How USAToday shamed Keith Olbermann into apologizing to Sec. Betsy DeVos

Last Saturday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tweeted a message expressing her department’s readiness to help schools impacted by Hurricane Harvey:

Our prayers are with all those in the path of #HurricaneHarvey. @usedgov stands ready to assist impacted schools.

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) August 26, 2017

Somehow, that anodyne message was enough to put progressive nutjob Keith Olbermann into a rage. He responded with this tweet calling the Secretary of Education a “Mother******”:

The hurricane is going to do less damage to schools than you are, Motherfucker https://t.co/D71GP8Qnw0

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) August 26, 2017

As you can see, the tweet was popular. In fact, it got a lot more attention than any of Olbermann’s videos have recently. David Mastio at USAToday asked Keith’s employers how they felt about directing this sort of language to a cabinet secretary. He describes what happened next:

Calling a member of the Cabinet a “mother—er” must be some seriously high-quality content because nobody at GQ or Condé Nast said anything about the colorfully worded tweet even as it was shared 19,000 times and liked 52,000 more over 48 hours. A few Trump-friendlywebsites got all priggish, but not one mainstream journalist on the media beat bothered to write an article…

Anyhoo, when nobody wrote about Olbermann’s vulgarity by Monday, I kinda thought that was odd, so I sent a couple emails hoping to ask a few questions of the GQ editor and Bob Sauerberg, CEO of Condé Nast. Almost five hours later, not a peep.

That changed when I started asking my questions on Twitter. Suddenly the GQ PR folks got responsive.

The moment Mastio took his concerns public, he was told to keep an eye on Olbermann’s Twitter feed. A short time later Olberman offered this apology:

I apologize without reservation to @BetsyDeVosED for the gutter language. I’ll reserve it for people who truly deserve it. http://pic.twitter.com/M83BFBQ2Uy

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) August 28, 2017

As Mastio points out, this is one part apology and one part advertisement for Olbermann’s forthcoming book. Olbermann may be an ugly caricature of far left extremism, but he knows there’s still a market for what he does and he’s going to continue to capitalize on it.