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Secret Service Apologizes For Tweet About 'Blathering' On Fox News

"Had to monitor Fox for a story. Can't. Deal. With. The. Blathering."

When that appeared on the U.S. Secret Service's on Wednesday it was immediately retweeted by many of the agency's 20,000+ Twitter followers and screengrabs were quickly captured before — as you might expect — it was quickly deleted.

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Twitter

Edwin Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, says in a statement sent to the news media that "an employee with access to the Secret Service's Twitter account, who mistakenly believed they were on their personal account, posted an unapproved and inappropriate tweet. ... The tweet did not reflect the views of the U.S. Secret Service and it was immediately removed. We apologize for this mistake, and the user no longer has access to our official account."

Policies and practices about tweeting are being "reinforced for all account users," he added.

This morning, Donovan told us that the agency wasn't singling out Fox for special attention. "We monitor all the different news organizations throughout the day," he said.

Hmm. So watch what you say about this in the comments thread.

As we wrote on May 10, the Secret Service just fired up the Twitter page this month. It's goal is to provide "an informative, helpful tool to businesses and individuals who are interested in information from our agency."

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.