Sean Hannity Urges Fans To Stop Destroying Their Keurig Machines, Promises To Replace Smashed Keurigs
Update, 4:20 PM: Sean Hannity spent part of his radio program today urging his fans to stop destroying their Keurig coffee makers in defense of free speech. Hannity opined that Keurig "were victims" of the left-leaning organization Media Matters.
"I accept the apology of the Keurig CEO," Hannity said. "Frankly, I think they were victims of they group they knew nothing about. … I feel sorry that they were dragged into politics."
Hannity also said he will replace the Keurig coffee machines smashed by his supporters. He expressed concern that the backlash to Keurig's tweet could hurt the company and its employees.
Hannity also said that he personally owns five Keurig machines.
Previously: When The Washington Post published an extraordinary piece of reporting on Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore's history of "dating" teenage girls last Thursday, no one could have guessed that the collateral damage from the article would come to include dozens of innocent coffee pod machines. And yet, that's where the news cycle is, four short days later. Here's how we got here.
On Thursday and Friday, Fox News star Sean Hannity attempted to discredit the women who accused Moore of sexually preying on them when they were teenagers and granted Moore a favorable interview on his radio show. In response, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone and others began pressuring companies to stop running ads against Hannity's Fox News program, and Keurig — among other companies — tweeted that it would no longer air ads during Hannity's show.
For some reason, Keurig's announcement provoked more of a backlash than those of Realtor.com, 23andMe, Nature's Bounty, Eloquii and E*Trade, which also announced that they wouldn't run ads against Hannity's show after his Moore coverage.
Using hashtags like #BoycottKeurig and #BreakYourKeurig, Hannity fans began posting videos of themselves smashing Keurig machines. Because… what better way to stand up for free speech than to flush $100 down the drain and deprive yourself of a way to make coffee in the morning?
Quickly, the social media protest movement morphed into an attempt to offend liberals, despite the lack of evidence that any liberals were genuinely upset by the Keurig destruction.
Hannity himself, apparently happy to draw attention away from his own questionable coverage of the Moore allegations, began approvingly retweeting the Keurig destroyers.
It looked like the whole thing would probably go down in history as a counterproductive attempt to own liberals — in the vein of those college protestors who wore adult diapers in public. But then Keurig itself responded in an incredibly stupid way. Keurig CEO Bob Gamfort sent a memo to his staff in which he decried "the appearance of 'taking sides'" and basically blamed everything his social media manager. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple obtained the memo, which reads, in part:
In most situations such as this one, we would "pause" our advertising on that particular program and reevaluate our go-forward strategy at a later date. That represents a prudent "business as usual" decision for us, as the protection of our brand is our foremost concern. However, the decision to publicly communicate our programming decision via our Twitter account was highly unusual. This gave the appearance of "taking sides" in an emotionally charged debate that escalated on Twitter and beyond over the weekend, which was not our intent.
I want you to know the decision to communicate our short-term media actions on Twitter was done outside of company protocols. Clearly, this is an unacceptable situation that requires an overhaul of our issues response and external communications policies and the introduction of safeguards to ensure this never happens again. Our company and brand reputations are too valuable to be put at risk in this manner.
[via The Washington Post]
So let's take a look at who comes out looking bad here: Roy Moore, obviously, for sexually exploiting teenage girls. Sean Hannity, for defending Roy Moore. Everyone who destroyed their own Keurig, for wasting money in an attempt to own liberals. And Keurig CEO Bob Gamfort, for failing to see that there aren't really two sides to the story when it comes to child molestation, and for throwing his social media editor under the bus. In other words, it was just another incredibly dumb weekend on Twitter.