and pundits,” the reporter was assailed for his own posts, made when he was 18 years old. As Calvin described them, the criticism involved “an off-color joke about same-sex marriage”; “a post quoting a rap lyric verbatim, a lyric which happened to include the n-word, which is something I wouldn’t do today”; and “a disparaging comment about the police in general.”
In the face of threats, The Register hired extra security to guard its offices and offered Calvin a hotel room for his safety.
Calvin instead decided to stay at a friend’s place, and it was there that he received a phone call from the human resources department of Gannett, The Register’s owner, telling him to decide between resigning or being fired. He chose to be fired.
This case illustrates a social media phenomenon called “cancel culture.” It also illustrates how emphatically news consumers can register their disapproval of news coverage in the digital age.
Calvin’s detractors were contending that his profile “canceled” King – imposing a kind of censure. The detractors, in response, “canceled” Calvin.
In an essay in The New York Times in 2020, Jonah Engel Bromwich analyzed cancel culture. (He approached the subject in the abstract, not in connection with this case.) Bromwich traced the concept of cancel culture from a joke on Black Twitter to a new meaning in which cancel described “a dynamic frequently playing out on social media. A person would say or do something that was offensive to others, and those people would call out the offender.” Because the phenomenon could turn punitive, Bromwich wrote, cancel culture offers “a glimpse into how social media has scrambled the way that power is distributed.” Bromwich assessed the phenomenon’s pluses and minuses: “Social media allows people to band together to hold institutions and people accountable, and to challenge dominant narratives. Can groupthink on social media have bleak consequences as well as inspiring ones? Yes. … [S]ocial media, and Twitter in particular, is not an ideal venue for hosting complex conversations about nuanced issues.”
The Iowa case exemplifies those nuanced issues. When The Register decided to do its profile of King, Calvin checked the profile subject’s social media postings as part of a larger examination of King’s life story. Calvin said later that such a check was a standard procedure for The Register, and he also was instructed by an editor to make the check.
Carol Hunter, The Register’s editor, wrote a column about the episode on September 27, 2019, emphasizing that there was no intention to disparage King. She then explained how the staff produced profiles about people in the news:
[R]eporters talk to family, friends, colleagues or professors. We check court and arrest records as well as other pertinent public records, including social media activity. The process helps us to understand the whole person.
Hunter then addressed how The Register’s editors decided whether to mention the old social media postings in the profile of King:
It weighed heavily on our minds that the racist jokes King tweeted, which we never published, were disturbing and highly inappropriate. On the other hand, we also weighed heavily that the tweets were posted more than seven years ago, when King was 16, and he was highly remorseful.
We ultimately decided to include a few paragraphs at the bottom of the story. As it turned out, our decision-making process was preempted when King held his evening news conference to discuss his tweets and when Busch Light’s parent company announced it would sever its future ties with King.
Hunter also discussed how The Register vetted job candidates. She wrote that the company uses “typical screening methods, which can include a review of past social media activity,” but this screening had not surfaced Calvin’s nine-year-old postings. After noting that Register employees are forbidden to post “…comments that include discriminatory remarks, harassment, threats of violence or similar content,” Hunter wrote: “We took appropriate action because there is nothing more important in journalism than having readers’ trust.”
In an essay headlined “Twitter Hates Me” on November 4, 2019, in Columbia Journalism Review.
Calvin defended checking King’s social media postings as an act of responsible journalism: “If I found the tweets, others would, too. I approached King with an understanding that what you tweet in high school is not necessarily representative of your beliefs as an adult, and he duly apologized.”
Calvin wrote that, despite his assurances to King in their interview, “he was worried about personal blowback. As is common in the world of celebrity PR, he moved to get ahead of the details that would be revealed in the profile.” Calvin thinks that is what led to King’s news conference in which he revealed the old tweets and apologized for them.
Calvin described what happened next:
Immediately after he released his statement, angry messages began to come in to The Register’s Facebook pages. The messages demanded that the identity of the journalist who had found King’s tweets be revealed, and threatened the reporter’s life and the lives of Register staff. The Register decided to publish my profile that night, and King tweeted that he bore the paper no ill will, but it was too late. The narrative that a Register reporter was trying to discredit Carson King had already been set in motion.
In the hours after King’s statement, people on Twitter found material that they used to discredit me, instead. They shared offensive tweets that I’d posted when I was younger, including statements that were meant sarcastically but that employed homophobic and misogynistic language. … Tweeting those things was a mistake, and I apologize for them.
Questions for Class Discussion
Do you think a journalist assigned to write a profile of a newsmaker should check the subject’s social media postings?
The editor of The Register said the decision about using King’s postings as a 16-year-old was “preempted” by King’s news conference in which he acknowledged the postings. Explain why, as a practical matter, King’s disclosure at the news conference left The Register with no choice but to mention the postings in some way.
If King had not held his news conference, would you have run the profile without mentioning the postings?
If you were editor, how would you respond to the kind of social media campaign that was aimed at The Register and Calvin?
Sources
Aaron Calvin, “Meet Carson King: the ‘Iowa legend’ who’s raised more than $1 million for charity off of a sign asking for beer money,” The Des Moines Register, Sept. 24, 2019.
Carol Hunter, editor of The Register, “We hear you. You’re angry. Here’s what we are doing about it.,” The Des Moines Register, Sept. 26, 2019.
Katie Shepherd, “Iowa reporter who found a viral star’s racist tweets slammed when critics find his own offensive posts,” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2019.
Shepherd, “Reporter who outed racist tweets by viral fundraiser leaves Des Moines Register after his own offensive posts surface,” The Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2019.
Julia Reinstein, “The reporter fired in the ‘Busch Light Guy’ scandal said he feels ‘abandoned’ by The Des Moines Register,”
