Photo credit: Bruce V. Boyajian
“Audrey my dog has tried it…so have I and so have many others,” said former legal eagle TV personality Greta van Susteren who just developed The Sorry App. “Have some lighthearted fun – it is free,” she exclaimed on her Facebook page. “Here is how: Get your phone and go to the App Store. Download the free app called The Sorry App and then sign up and get started. Audrey has apologized (sort of) for shredding the mail as it came through the mail slot…but is she really, really, really sorry? You watch and then you vote : Accept or reject. And then it is your turn or maybe you want to turn your camera on a friend to say sorry or even your pet. With all the turmoil going on right now in the world…saying sorry can be fun. Also share this post if you know someone who might like this or need it.” Personally, we think she stole the idea from the Playbook of Connie Francis, the 60’s singing icon famous for her “Who’s Sorry Now?”
Refresher video: Here are the lyrics if the video is dismantled: LYRICS
The evening was actually, in addition to The Sorry App, a celebration of van Susteren’s just published book: Everything You Need to Know About Social Media (Without Having to Call a Kid) hosted by Anita McBride, Tammy Haddad and Connie Milstein at The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC with friends from the media, the Administration, from the Hill and included her former CNN’s Burden of Proof co-host Roger Cossack – a Greta bestie.
Roger Cossack, Greta van Susteren and John Coale
“You’re a great example of bipartisanship in Washington which is not dead,” said Mc Bride. “It is important and big things are happening every single day. Thank you for the book. This is important for everybody to read and understand what the future of social media is. That’s what I like about this. It is forward looking. Thank you for your example.”
Greta van Susteren and Anita McBride
About the book: The most practical, thorough, and reader-friendly guide around to living well on social media. From answering basic questions like “What’s the best site for you?” to “How to Tweet” and “What does it mean to ‘Tag’ someone?” to addressing important moral and behavioral issues like how to protect your privacy, how to avoid being roasted online, and whether it’s okay to get your news from Facebook, this is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to stay up to date with today’s changing technology. (courtesy of Simon & Schuster)
Roberta McCain, everyone’s favorite guest, is about to turn 106.
“I was gonna show her the questions, but she didn’t want to look at them. She’s been through all of it,” said Haddad, “so let me start with the most important question that people in this room ask me. Who actually wrote this book? Which 16 year old wrote the book?” “Bob Barnett,” Greta responded playfully. “Every book in town is written by Bob Barnett. Bob does them all.”
Carol Melton and Bob Barnett
What Greta discovered while researching the book: “They’re following everything we do. If we go shopping, I look at a camera on Amazon and then say, ‘Oh no, I have too many cameras. That’s too expensive. I don’t want to buy another camera.’ Then I think, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s not a good camera.’ Then every day I keep looking on Facebook. ‘Oh look, there’s that camera. Wow, that is a coincidence.’ I go to Twitter, I go someplace else. I go on all the different platforms and that camera keeps showing up. I think, ‘Oh, it must be popular. Maybe I should get it,’ and so I buy it. So yes, of course they’re watching everything we do.” She does suggest that Facebook and Twitter and Google better pay a little bit more attention. They are not just a social media company. They are a lot like drugs. They are aggregators of news and people are very unhappy with what’s being put on these websites as untrue or even defamatory. They’ve been hauled up to Capital Hill and I think they better get their [act] together. If I were their lawyer, I’d come up with a solution real fast, because if they don’t come up with a solution real fast, Amy Klobuchar, the Senator from Minnesota will. I would not want Senator Amy Klobuchar after my business.” As regards the news on Facebook and other social media outlets, Greta says that “if you find something that you find appealing that feeds to your viewpoint and go, ‘Aha, that’s it,’ now you’ve reconfirmed what you thought originally, plus you pass it to your friends and you spread it. It’s very insidious that way. It’s very dangerous.”
Emily Heil and Senator Amy Klobuchar
Regarding the news: “I don’t like the falsehoods. I don’t like the name callings. I hate that. I can’t stand that. If you don’t agree with the President, you don’t have to say he’s deranged or demented or whatever. Be strong, be vigorous, be robust in your question, your examination of him. But you don’t have to be insulting, because it also insults the office of the President of the United States, which will endure after many, may administrations. I like vigorous debate, but I do like the truth and I do like fundamentally good manners, like we do in the Midwest. People don’t realize that what you read about the media on all these website makes you think we’re at each other’s throats and that we hate each other. But looking around the room, it’s all different news organizations. We’re all friends. You go out in the field and cover something, and if you’ve got a problem with a power cord or something, everybody helps everybody else. We’re competing, but I think it’s a very different picture that is portrayed in the media, even about us.”
About The Sorry App: “Back in September of 2016, I suddenly found myself unemployed to my great surprise. That’s not when I got fired, that’s when I left. But anyway, I came up with the idea of The Sorry App. What it is – it has a couple features – is #1 it’s a little bit like Snap. For those of you who are over the age of 25 – actually probably only two people in this room that know what Snap is – one of the features is that young people use their phones now to talk to each other. We use the telephone, but the young people will use their phones. It allows you to send an apology to someone else, peer to peer, and the person receives it, and then it disappears. And a person can accept it or reject it. The reason why it vanishes like Snap is because if I send an apology, I don’t want you to run around saying, ‘Look what a looser Van Susteren is.’ I’m a loser in case you don’t accept it. That’s one. Then there’s the second. There’s the public apology and there’s a lot of that going on right now. Think of Kathy Griffin when she did her apology and everybody had an opinion about it. Every single day, this is as of last April, more than 475,000 times in 24 hours people are apologizing on social media. So I was, ‘I’m gonna decide to grab that.’ I learned something about my own apologies doing this.”
Betsy Fischer Martin, Sean Spicer, Tammy Haddad
“My husband knows this,” van Susteren added. “He’s like, ‘you know the old AOL You’ve got mail? Well now you need the app.’ The thing I learned about, every time I apologized, is that I got six excuses to why it was okay. I apologized. ‘Okay, I did this. But the reason I did this …’ It was fun. I even learned about my own apologies. This is not to be a lot of hand wringing. I put my pets on there for shredding our mail every time it comes through the app that our dogs shred it. Anyway, so that’s when you are unemployed, you think about things to do and mine was an app.”
The Sorry, apology group!
Greta van Susteren and Tammy Haddad
So everyone in the room that wanted to apologize to someone got in a group apology photo. “Okay,” said Haddad. “All of you people that have nothing to apologize for, we are taking names. Now on the count of three we’re gonna say the three magic words, ‘I am sorry.’ Okay, ready? One, two, three. I am sorry.”
