On Monday night, the television network TBS tweeted out a video juxtaposing clips of Hillary Clinton laughing next to clips of a hyena. The whole thing seemed like lazy sexism at its finest, and prompted Samantha Bee — who hosts the blistering Full Frontal With Samantha Bee on the network — to tell her employers to “delete your account.” Bee’s tweet, of course, is a reference to the meme which was adopted by Clinton who sent the same phrase to Donald Trump. And comparing someone to a hyena is arguably more rude than calling them “crooked.”
Now on Tuesday morning, Bee’s tweet is gone, but so is the hyena video. According to Variety, TBS has formally apologized for the video, like so:
“This post was obviously a poor attempt at humor and has been taken down,” TBS said. “Moving forward we’ll leave political satire to professionals like Samantha Bee.”
The video had been up since last week, after it was created by a TBS website called The Heckler. It got Bee’s notice when the main TBS Twitter account promoted it.
Criticizing your employer so publicly is dicey territory. Bee took down her tweet shortly after it went up, but to their credit, TBS got the message and responded gracefully. After all, if this is what the former Daily Show correspondent is known for anyway, especially on Full Frontal, then it just makes for good promotion in the long run.
(via Variety)
