An off-the-record comment by Barack Obama calling Kanye West a “jackass” was tweeted by an ABC reporter, who quickly deleted the tweet from ABC New’s Twitter account. But the tweet was retweeted by hundreds of thousands of followers, prompting an ABC spokesman to release a statement.
From Michael Calderones’ blog at Politico.com:
ABC News reporter Terry Moran caused quite a commotion tonight on Twitter following after writing: “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”
Although it wasn’t long before Moran removed it, with over a million followers, the tweet quickly bounced around Twitter through various users.
Now, an ABC spokesperson explains to POLITICO what happened:
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.
Obama gets props for verbally expressing what many of us are thinking about that attention whore, Kanye.
