The Busch Light guy and the Des Moines Register

Enjoy: Busch Light Videos - YouTube

 

Again, don't do a racism and you'll be fine.

But as a journalism question, let's flip this around.

What if the DMR runs the feature without checking his social media history?

An hour after it posts, some reader somewhere brings up the same tweets and the DMR gets roasted for not having done its due diligence.

 

What if ... the paper does a background check on its own reporter and finds offensive posts from years ago?

 

A paper that size, with a decent reputation like it has (had?) that doesn't do a background check on a reporter before hiring them is deserving of every bit of scorn that comes their way.

 

Honest question: Would the DMR get roasted because it didn't unearth two six-year-old tweets that were written by a non-public figure when he was a teenager? It wasn't like the guy had been arrested or had been tweeting out racist stuff earlier in the year. I can't imagine that too many people would be ripping the newspaper because those slipped through the cracks.

 

I don't know if he's the same person. I know he's a person who compared black people to gorillas and never cared enough to remove it from his twitter page.

I will say this: I think he's responded to the controversy with a lot more class than the people defending him.

I'm not going to go through life making excuses for other people's racist bullshit. It's working fine for me.

 

To me, the bigger "crime" may be not bothering to take it down at any point. It was a stupid thing to do at the time, but you've got to clean that shit up. Too much is at stake for someone that age to let that sit out there.

Put me in the "thank God there was no social media around when I was that age" crowd, but even then, I can't imagine I'd have ever compared black people to gorillas. Not throwing stones from my glass house, just trying to be honest.

I'm also with Clip, that I don't think the DMR would get roasted for not shoe-horning that into the story. Do a check to make sure he doesn't have a history of being a serial rapist of drunk co-eds who is now asking for beer money, but then move on. Would it have been ridiculous for the reporter to casually mention the tweets, say they aren't including it in the story but maybe he needs to think about deleting them before someone else finds them and makes a big deal of it?

I'd bet life would have been much easier and business would be better at the DMR if he would have done that.

 

Goes without saying. Of course.

I'm not sure how any company in this day and age can hire anyone without doing at least a cursory social media background search.

 

I don't disagree, but the arc of these things - innocuous or not - has become pretty predictable.

Person A appears in a feature story.

Internet rando chases down Person A's social media history. Asks 'why is the media doing a favorable story on this racist/sexist/fascist/antifa/bigot/etc.' Makes big noise about same on social media.

Person A apologizes.

How much blowback the news organization then suffers varies from case to case.

 

My wife is the HR director for a non-profit organization with several locations and probably 750 employees. When she posts an open position and does the initial whittling of applicants, the first thing she does, before even doing phone interviews, is to do a cursory search of their public social media pages. She doesn't friend them or follow them, but just looks at what is out there for anyone to see.

The things she finds to disqualify people for are unbelievable - people posting about getting high all the time, calling in sick because they are hung over, bitching about their current job and boss. Makes her search easier, and she will tell people if they call to ask about their status what's up. She said many people think the social media stuff is somehow "protected" from being looked at, even the public posts.

 

Here's the thing I've always wondered. How does someone just search Twitter for these things? It's one thing to pull up someone's page and scroll through their fairly recent tweets. But to find tweets from years ago? I legit don't know how to do that easily.

Are they just entering random queries into the search bar? Like Craig Sagers Tailor + fuck, Craig Sagers Tailor + shit, Craig Sagers Tailor + cuntwaffle, etc.?