While President Barack Obama was doing one of his normal interviews for CNBC, they took a little break during which some ‘off the record’ questions were asked. Rather than continue to harp on the tired issues of health care reform or economic recovery, someone asked the President what was really on everybody’s mind:
What did he think of Kanye West’s behavior at the Video Music Awards?
Unfortunately, anyone with the intelligence of your average house plant is on Twitter. Never was this more obvious than when ABC White House Correspondent Terry Moran released an unplanned tweet to the world. When President Obama was asked the question—again, off the record—he responded pretty much the way the rest of the world did. He is, after all, human.
"Health care is a mess and we're trying to repair the economy, and you want to talk about what?"
So Terry Moran, as excited as a teenage girl at a Jonas Brothers concert, accessed the ”Twitter-verse”, and quickly wrote “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at the VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.” Then he hit ‘send’ or ‘tweet’, or whatever.
And everyone immediately took to their other favorite way to not talk to live humans, ever: Facebook, where a poll had been placed asking if it was okay of the President to “call out” Kanye West like that. 78% of Facebook users said they were glad Obama “called him out”. 12% said that he was right, but he shouldn’t have said anything. 9% think that the President is a jackass. 1% love Kanye still.
By this time, Moran had long since removed it from his own Twitter page, but it had been re-tweeted and bounced all over the e-world, so it’s still out there. In the information age, you can’t call anyone a jackass without everyone on the planet hearing about it.
An ABC spokesperson released the following statement:
In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a
CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks
that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done
before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the
White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.
What, like making sure your correspondents aren’t screwing around on Twitter when the President is speaking? At least password-protect the ABC Twitter page so not every idiot can post to it.
The White House has not commented on the incident, but what more can they say? President Obama is with at least 78% of the population on this one. Kanye can apologize and wear all black and look somber and donate diamonds to the poor all day long, and it still won’t make him less of a jackass. So it wasn’t a “presidential” thing to say. This is the first time in a long time that we’ve had a normal person in the White House. He reacted normally, and the combination of a President saying ‘jackass’ and the quick thumbs of some guy with a press pass created a media firestorm.
Social Networking: Embarrass yourself quickly and efficiently, to the entire world, in 140 characters or less.