JACKSON, Miss., — Imagine for a moment you are sitting at your desk in the newsroom when you find out that some celebrity has called for you to be fired from your job, because you reported a story on a local hunter who had bagged a white turkey.
You also find out said celebrity has instructed his two million followers on Twitter to make life for this local hunter “living hell,” because of your story.
That is exactly what happened to Clarion Ledger outdoor reporter Brian Broom earlier this week after ESPN Sports Center anchor Keith Olbermann tweeted about Broom’s report of Hunter Waltman’s well documented account of snagging the rare wild bird on the second day of turkey hunting season in Mississippi on March 16.
“It be rare and beautiful so me should kill it,” the mocking tweet began.
“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. And the nitwit clown who wrote this fawning piece should be fired.” — Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) March 26, 2019
Waltman’s story of harvesting the turkey was a detailed examination of how a hunter goes about the process, from the hours of waiting, tracking, observing, and ultimately snaring their game. It is a tradition going back generations. It does not simply involve a gun and a target, but a deeper understanding of nature and the patterns of their prey.
A prey that nearly every non-vegan, non-vegetarian American eats every fourth Thursday in November.
Brian Broom, the reporter, engaged in the basic procedures of his own trade. “I had contacted Hunter Waltman after I saw posts on Facebook, interviewed him and he sent me photos. I found some biologists who were quite familiar with turkeys and got their opinions on it, and packaged it all together and put it out here.”
“It had quite a bit of success according to our metrics, then it started slowing down as you would guess, then Tuesday morning someone in our office had noticed that all of a sudden it had more and more concurrent views. We found that it was coming from a tweet.”
His immediate reaction was big traffic meant a lot of readers. That turned swiftly into deep concern for Hunter Waltman when he saw the threat.
Broom said as an outdoors writer there is an expectation that there will be some anger towards a story about hunting. He gets that whenever a story goes national, but usually it’s a small reaction.
“Here hunting and fishing and other outdoor activities are engrained in many Mississippians. That stems from the fact that we have so much opportunity … We’ve got the Mississippi River running along one of our boarders. We have many interior rivers. We have the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico. We have an excess of a million acres of public hunting land,” he said of the culture and traditions.
“There is a lot of opportunity in Mississippi, and therefore, it’s just natural that people would gravitate toward that opportunity. These resources have always been here,” he said.
Hunting, he said is something generations of Mississippians have been doing and considered perfectly normal.
Making fun of people who hunt or are from the South seems to be something perfectly normal for someone like Olbermann, a millionaire who makes his living peddling contempt.
“It’s rare and beautiful so me should kill it,” Olbermann wrote mockingly. Olbermann clearly believes people who are both hunters and from Mississippi are so dumb they speak like a Hollywood cave man.
So Olbermann begins the tweet reinforcing the pop-culture brand of the elite that hunters and people from the South are slow and or stupid. He then goes on to show his ignorance of both hunting and journalism, wanting the reporter fired for doing his job.
Broom’s job as an outdoor reporter, which he has done for nearly 30 years, has given him the equivalent of a biology degree, “In the reporting you deal with diseases. You deal with ecology, which is a very complicated area. You deal with a lot of things that require a lot of working knowledge about not just game animals, but how the entire ecosystem works,” he said.
And so do hunters.
So why does Olbermann get away with making bigoted stereotypes of hunters and reporters from Mississippi and threaten them on social media? Why are ESPN and Twitter fine with that? Probably because the people who sit in the boardrooms of ESPN and Twitter think Olbermann’s assessment of Mississippians is basically true.
This contempt of our larger institutions are towards the people in the middle of our country is a dangerous illness, and Olbermann is a living symptom of it.
