I think he was wrong for thinking the tweets deserved to be in the story, as the way they were included didn't contribute to the story at all. He didn't deserve to be fired over it though, because, like you said, it's ultimately the editor's decision to include that. The editors are also the ones that tell their reporters to dig into subject's social media history to seemingly look for anything controversial.
Twitter hates me. The Des Moines Register fired me. Here’s what really happened.
- Thread starter Bigman38
- Start date
..instead of attempting to understand the nuances of a man’s character within the complexities of the world, readers reacted by punishing the writer who made those complications visible.
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He made a couple decent points but agree with others that the tone of the article is pretty annoying. IF it was their standard practice then higher ups at the Register needed to be let go, or he shouldn't have lost his job. However, going back 7 years into someone's Twitter doesn't seem like standard practice to me. My money is this guy went looking for dirt and found it
The whole point was them trying to generate additional clicks and thinking they'd win some sort of award for being so woke and their investigative work. When it backfired, then no one wanted to own it and they used the reporter as a scapegoat for the whole thing. In the end, the DMR editors surely were aware of what they were publishing and gave their green light on this. The head editor should have been the first one fired for this debacle. Carson King was not running for office so including tweets like these was totally unecessary for the story being published.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to run a tool that just pulls someone's tweet history into a more readable document that can be quickly skimmed.
Doubt he spent more than a few minutes doing that, not it was like he spent all day combing through them.
While there’s a tiny part of me that sympathizes with him for being fired after doing exactly what his employer told him to do, this is a very well crafted one-sided story written to put himself in the best light possible, and even then it screams of hypocrisy - the whole “burial” of Carson King via racist tweets meanwhile having his own skeletons hidden in his own social media history.
You know why I tend to sympathize with Carson King while with the journalist I can’t get much further than “world’s smallest violin”? King owned up to it, while the journalist owns up to nothing - granted, it’s a well-crafted piece of owning up to nothing, and yes, he got railroaded himself by the Rag, but all he does is point fingers to remove any blame from himself.
You know why I tend to sympathize with Carson King while with the journalist I can’t get much further than “world’s smallest violin”? King owned up to it, while the journalist owns up to nothing - granted, it’s a well-crafted piece of owning up to nothing, and yes, he got railroaded himself by the Rag, but all he does is point fingers to remove any blame from himself.
I want to believe Calvin was just following the orders of his editorial team, but the fact that Gannett chose to employ a person with past tweets that were of similar/worse tone than King's (thus, showing they either didn't complete a background check or chose to gloss over it in some capacity) is what rubs me wrong here.
You're telling me they have stronger background checks for people they run stories on than people they hire? They should both be the same.
You're telling me they have stronger background checks for people they run stories on than people they hire? They should both be the same.
I think this is mostly a moot point because of the news that occurred that day before the Register published its profile. First, as we know now, Busch Light backed out that afternoon because they learned of the tweets. Second, Carson King held his own press conference and issued his own statement that evening confirming the tweets.
So by that evening, the Register hadn't even published anything yet and the whole thing was public knowledge. They posted their profile that night around 9:30 IIRC, and if they published that without mentioning all that had happened that day, it would have been irresponsible.
The thing that nobody seems to get here is that if the Register had set out to damage Carson King, they would have led the story with the damaging part. And actually, if they had set out to damage Carson King they probably don't publish the glowing profile at all and instead focus on the damaging story.
But they didn't do that; instead they buried it and the Busch Light news near the end, almost as an afterthought.
Well written.
But I'm a bit confused. Calvin states that the revelation of the Tweets wasn't intended as a "Gotcha" moment. Can we verify this? The piece that Calvin describes writing (or working on) and that he describes as being "preempted' by a statement from King...was that published?
Was it truly an exploration of King's growth as a person?
If it's Register policy to do a background check my beef has always been with the editors for including Tweets from a 16 y/o as background. And were those retweets? Not that it makes it okay but it would put the racist guilt mostly on Daniel Tosh.
Ultimately the lesson (which Calvin illustrates) is that print journalism is in the sh&tter. It's a sad story all around.
But I'm a bit confused. Calvin states that the revelation of the Tweets wasn't intended as a "Gotcha" moment. Can we verify this? The piece that Calvin describes writing (or working on) and that he describes as being "preempted' by a statement from King...was that published?
Was it truly an exploration of King's growth as a person?
If it's Register policy to do a background check my beef has always been with the editors for including Tweets from a 16 y/o as background. And were those retweets? Not that it makes it okay but it would put the racist guilt mostly on Daniel Tosh.
Ultimately the lesson (which Calvin illustrates) is that print journalism is in the sh&tter. It's a sad story all around.
He didn't get fired for running Carson's twitter history in the story per policy and his editor's direction. He ultimately got canned because of his own ugly social media history becoming public.
The timeline presented by the Register just doesn't make sense. They claim they didn't notify Busch of the tweets, but they pulled all merchandise, etc from him prior to the story running. Just a coincidence that Calvin and Busch found the tweets at the exact same time?
Seems to me like after the bolded happened, it was pretty apparent the Register could have read the reaction from the public that was already happening (there was already outrage that afternoon) and instead pivoted to issue a release saying their editorial team had uncovered inappropriate tweets, but had instead chosen to not publish them while explaining that people (Carson King) can change/grow in a positive manner.
Instead, they chose to go forward with exactly what the public was already pissed off about.
And doing it your way would have changed...what exactly? Publishing a release saying they discovered the tweets but didn't publish them is literally publishing the tweets.
Yes, I agree there is some fishy smell regarding the Register's account timeline.
My big question with their version of it is their statement that they did not inform AB of the tweets.
I've mentioned it in other posts, there is a difference between "informing" and asking for a comment on the tweets. Technically if you are asking AB about the tweets, you are not "informing" them of their existence. I suspect the Register contacted AB to get their statement regarding King's twitter history, and that prompted AB to dig.
Nowhere is it addressed if the Register ever contacted or asked AB about the tweets. If they did, fine. If they didn't, fine. Just don't be vague about it, in an attempt to make themselves look better.
Very clever in repeatedly referring to King as a "public figure" so as to make a defamation claim practically impossible.
Would there still be people angry about digging up the tweets in the first place? Sure.
Though I'd say they'd have gotten a lot of people off their back if they'd taken the approach of "not trying to ruin a good thing, we're for personal growth" instead of running the story as they did with the tweets that seemed completely out of place in a story about a guy raising millions for charity.
What is there to sympathize with Carson King over? The only negative repercussion he had was losing his advertising deal with Busch Light, which would have been short lived anyway and didn't really seem to be something that would have benefited him financially. In the end he still raised a huge amount of money for charity and got his 15 minutes of fame. No one thinks less of him than they did prior to the Register article. If anything, he has a higher profile than he would have otherwise. I'd be interested to know what he actually feels about all this insanity in private. The only thing I sympathize with him about is that he's being held up as the poster child for a social media crusade.
Meanwhile, this journalist lost his job and will never be able to work in his chosen career field again. He was railroaded by the Register and the general public of Iowa. I feel bad for the guy, he simply reported on publicly available information and has now received death threats. I do think the journalist should own up to his tweets and agree that it's a very strange and stupid loophole that the Register doesn't vet their own employees. But none of that has anything to do with the source of this outrage - a benign article. I guarantee the reason the Register wrote it the way they did is because they didn't want to write a glowing profile of Carson King with no mention of these tweets, only for someone else to find these tweets and write an -actual- smear piece on him. They were protecting their own reputation by mentioning the tweets and seemed to be trying to protect King's reputation by putting the tweets in context. Not anything to congratulate them about, but also nothing to tar and feather them about either. I feel worse for the journalist than Carson King because the punishment he has received is extremely disproportionate to his crimes.
I think this is the most important line of the story...
"it was my job to write about viral news in Iowa and to frame my stories in ways that would increase their viral potential."
His job was to literally write stories in a way that gave them the potential to go viral. Well, he and they got the clicks that they so desperately wanted and learned real fast that trying to combine click baiting with actual journalism is a bad idea.
This is why so many people were upset.
Later, his left leaning political views came to light and he became a caricature of what many center to right leaning people in Iowa have come to view a reporter at the Register to be. Many of us feel that the Register lost their right to claim to be the voice of all Iowans a long time ago and some people chose - unfairly - to take out their frustrations with the Register on him.
"it was my job to write about viral news in Iowa and to frame my stories in ways that would increase their viral potential."
His job was to literally write stories in a way that gave them the potential to go viral. Well, he and they got the clicks that they so desperately wanted and learned real fast that trying to combine click baiting with actual journalism is a bad idea.
This is why so many people were upset.
Later, his left leaning political views came to light and he became a caricature of what many center to right leaning people in Iowa have come to view a reporter at the Register to be. Many of us feel that the Register lost their right to claim to be the voice of all Iowans a long time ago and some people chose - unfairly - to take out their frustrations with the Register on him.
