Anti-Trump #Resistance hero Keith Olbermann received a talking to from ESPN, his employer, after demanding Mississippi Clarion-Ledger journalist Brian Broom be fired and encouraging an Internet mob to harass a 22-year-old hunter Broom wrote about for the outlet.
Olbermann posted Broom’s Clarion Ledger piece chronicling Hunter Waltman’s kill of a rare white turkey to Twitter on Tuesday. And in typical unhinged fashion, the former MSNBC personality urged social media users to make Waltman’s life “a living hell.”
“It be rare and beautiful so me should kill it,” mocked the 60-year-old. “This pea-brained scumbag identifies himself as Hunter Waltman and we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell.”
The politico added, “And the nitwit clown who wrote this fawning piece should be fired.”
According to Fox News, ESPN “confirmed that it has ‘spoken to’” Olberman over his controversial comments concerning the young hunter and Broom.
“We have spoken to him about not making personal attacks,” an ESPN representative said in a statement.
As Broom noted in his feature on Waltman, the hunter received mild criticism online, mostly because some argued that the turkey he killed was not wild, but domestic livestock. The hunter maintained that the rare bird was “100 percent wild,” and certified wildlife biologist Bob Eriksen agreed.
“The naked head and neck do not appear to be as ornate as one would expect in a domestic turkey gobbler,” Eriksen, a Natural Resources Conservation Service technical service provider, informed Broom. “Even in a first-generation cross between an eastern wild turkey and a domestic bird there would be evidence of domestic traits such as a very large, ornate head and neck and an excessively large dewlap. In addition a F1 would exhibit short lower legs that would be heavier than those of a wild eastern.”
The Clarion-Ledger’s Executive Editor Sam R. Hall took a swing at Olbermann for his ignorance of hunting culture and his outrageous call for Broom to be fired for doing his job.
“Keith Olbermann says Brian Broom should be fired for writing this story. What was I thinking? I guess I should have fired our outdoors writer for writing about a hunter killing an unusual turkey during turkey hunting season,” teased Hall.
The executive editor added that Olbermann’s comments were “recklessly irresponsible.”
“Someone with his following needs to understand the possible impact of his words,” Hall noted. ”Telling over 1 million people to make someone’s life a living hell could have seriously dangerous consequences. In our newsroom, that would be a fireable offense, not writing a story about a hunter bagging a turkey.”
In November 2017, Olbermann, one of the loudest voices in the #Resistance movement, announced the end of his YouTube show “The Resistance” for GQ magazine. During his goodbye, Olbermann assured the public that President Donald Trump’s presidency would soon come to an end.
“I am confident now, even more so than I have been over the last year that this nightmare presidency of Donald John Trump will end prematurely and end soon, and I am thus also confident that this is the correct moment to end this series of commentaries,” he said at the time, according to Real Clear Politics. “This ballgame is also over and I don’t think it’s going to last another 13 months. And so this series is over.”
In the words of President Trump, things are looking pretty “Sad!” for Olbermann all around.