The Busch Light guy and the Des Moines Register

Dude with a College GameDay sign got way more money in his venmo account than expected and sent that money to charity - specifically the kids hospital at Iowa. More than 1 million.

DMR then did a story on him - a long, mostly positive story - that included a "routine background check" of his social media and found racist jokes on his Twitter account from 8 years ago when he was 16.

Meet Carson King, the 'Iowa Legend' who's raised more than $1 million for charity off of a sign asking for beer money

He publicly apologized.

A Change.org petition started to get the DMR to apologize.

 

I hate stories like that - I think checking social media is good - but going back to when someone was a minor? Kind of icky and pervy. And unless it is directly related to the story, why run it?
It's like when news orgs to a data base search on someone and do a complete legal report whether they know it is connected to the reason they searched in the first place. A dead woman and a missing boyfriend and the missing boyfriend has a domestic assault or is still legally married to someone else? By all means. There is a bus crash and you report the dead bus driver had two bankruptcies and was late on child support? Probably not.

 

The reporter who dug up those two tweets is now in the world of shit because he had A LOT of racist, homophobic and anti-cop tweets as recently as 2015. He says he's deleted the tweets and his account is now private. The paper "is aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts by one of our staffers, and an investigation has begun."

 

maybe don't be a racist

 

I'd fire the reporter for not knowing how the Internet works. How do you not scrub your own timeline the second you know that you are going to have to write about his guy's tweets?

 

To be fair, many newspaper editors/execs are still figuring out how the internet works, since nobody really knew how to make many off it for years. Also would love to know what the editing process is like at some places. Does this person's ASE even read the copy? Does it go straight to the copy desk, or worse, the universal desk?

And I feel awful for everyone at the DMR who do great jobs and have nothing to do with this debacle and are going to have to deal with the blowback anyways.

 

An editor has to say "No." Sometimes, social media history is fair game. Not in this case.

 

Here comes @Azrael being all reasonable and shit.

 

sorry

I must have misposted

 

You'd like to think this story was carefully edited and all angles were considered. OR ...... a harried night editor rushed through it and sent it to the shared-services madhouse and that was it.

 

All I know is this: didn't even know Busch Light existed until earlier this summer. I've been informed it sells like crazy in the Midwest.