GQ columnist is far from gentlemanly
On a weekend when people were dying in Texas flooded by Hurricane Harvey, the last thing anyone should have been talking about was Keith Olbermann. Perhaps that is why the serially fired journalist was driven to Twitter to call Betsy DeVos a “mother------.”
DeVos, the Trump administration’s secretary of Education, is a normal Republican in an administration that is anything but normal.
As a result, she is the author of some of its least memorable tweets. Over the weekend, she promised federal help for schools affected by the storm and offered prayers for “all those in the path of #HurricaneHarvey.” So naturally, GQ special correspondent Keith Olbermann delivered this retort:
“The hurricane is going to do less damage to schools than you are, Mother------.”
Given the epic flooding in Texas, that’s open to debate. What is more certain is that the G in GQ, no longer stands for “Gentlemen’s.”
My guess is that “Gentlemen’s” went out at the same time that the quarterly changed to a monthly publication, but I don’t know for sure.
I tried to ask GQ editor Jim Nelson about that, but he never replied. Nelson had plenty to say about Olbermann when the former MSNBC host was front-page news in the New York Times business section just weeks before President Donald Trump’s election last fall.
“I missed Keith’s rage,” Nelson said back when Olbermann’s GQ videos had been downloaded only 25 million times. “We wanted to add to our political and election coverage. … We felt that no one was meeting Trump at the temperature level that was needed.”
Even a spokesperson for the Condé Nast-owned magazine didn’t have anything to say about GQ’s mysterious “G.” She emailed me: “GQ declines to comment.”
Of course not, because the meaning of the G in GQ is now a corporate secret of the firm that also owns Glamour, Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, a family of magazines “renowned for producing the highest quality content for the world’s most influential audiences.”
Flinging foul language at a member of the Cabinet must be some seriously highquality 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 Trumpfriendly websites got all priggish, but not one mainstream journalist on the media beat bothered to write an article.
And to be fair, a lot more important things were going on in the country then, just as they are right now. At a time when Trump’s recklessness and deadly flooding are dominating the news, journalists don’t have time to cover trivial things like Melania Trump’s high heels. And there’s certainly not time for things that happen every day, like Melania Trump’s high heels. Oh … wait …
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. Within minutes, a representative was on the phone requesting to speak off the record. Now, I can’t tell you what he said about one of GQ’s most prominent public faces, but I can tell you what I said.
I promised I would include an important fact in anything I wrote. The important fact is that even though GQ’s website and Olbermann’s Twitter profile say Olbermann is a “GQ special correspondent,” and his anti-Trump videos for GQ have been downloaded more than 170 million times, it is not accurate to associate Olbermann with GQ or Condé Nast because he is not a full-time employee.
Before I had time to write, I got another call from GQ telling me to keep a close eye on Olbermann’s Twitter feed. Minutes later, this appeared:
At first glance, Olbermann’s words sound like a solid apology, except for three things:
The promo for his F-bomb-titled book is bigger than the apology.
Olbermann left up his post calling DeVos that word.
And if you read carefully, he promises to keep that gutter language coming. He’ll just be more judicious.
If Donald Trump ever apologized, that’s just the kind of apology he’d deliver.
Although Trump keeps moving on to bigger venues, and Olbermann’s most influential days look to be behind him, the president of the United States and the “GQ special correspondent” have much more in common.
For decades, both have been part of a corrosive reality TV culture that puts spite and anger above thoughtfulness and decency. Both men (and their fans) thrive on the partisan hatreds tearing our country apart.
Neither man is anything like a gentleman in a time when that’s what we desperately need.
David Mastio is the deputy editorial page editor of USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter, @DavidMastio.
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