The Busch Light guy and the Des Moines Register

I appreciate your response. Like I said, your perspective means a lot more than mine does.

 

It’s very easy to do if you know what you’re looking for, as in, certain words within a Tweet, etc.

 

Ya mean like choose Jerry Lewis in blackface as your avatar?

 

Just sounds like an exhausting and probably often fruitless exercise.

 

I believe that's the easiest way to do it. I've never searched someone else's Twitter, but every 6 months or so - when stories like this one come up - I do a quick audit of mine to make sure there's nothing stupid out there that I've forgotten about.

 

Keep fuckin' that chicken, dude.

It's clown makeup from the film "The Day the Clown Cried."

 

We hear you. You’re angry. Here’s what we are doing about it.

Update ... reporter no longer with the DMR, they say they will do better vetting employees' social media history, they deny alerting Anheuser-Busch beforehand.

That would lead one to believe that 10 days after he gained attention with this sign, the DMR and A-B just happened to both discover the tweets within hours of each other. Bullshit.

The top editor, in charge as hires were made without any social media vetting, needs to go, too. I don't think this is blowing over anytime soon.

 

I tend to believe that someone tipped off both the DMR and AB about the tweets.

 

And this is why I never use Twitter to post my thoughts on anything. Just final scores, links to stories, injury updates and not one sliver of opinion on anything ever.

I don't care if you're age 16 or 66, you should know better. And if you don't, your parents failed you.

 

To those familiar with this story. I don't know why I care but I was thinking about it. How many of you agree with fredrick on this ...
Since the Register discovered the inappropriate tweets, I think they had a couple choices and the one they picked was the wrong one.
a.) Write a sidebar on the inappropriate tweets. Make sure to start it on the same page of the fishwrap story that the feel-good story appeared on; make sure it's right under the main story on the Internet site. As a secondary item but definitely a separate item. Because of the presence of the sidebar, don't even mention the evil tweets in the main feel-good story.
b.) Reverse course and lead with the tweets on the good deed story. Tie in the good deed, but in 2019 the tweets became the bigger story, sad as I feel and dirty as I feel saying that. Buckle down and get ready for criticism. But your reporter discovered the nasty tweets and that suddenly has become the story in the evil year of 2019 where we look for the worst in people.
c.) What you DO NOT do is what the paper did. They wrote the feel good feature and then boom out of nowhere in the final few graphs, oh by the way, look at what this guy tweeted in the past. It had NOTHING to do with the original story, so you can't just throw it in there at the end to satisfy some fake journalism integrity edict.

SO DO YOU AGREE WITH FREDRICK? You either write a sidebar and make sure everybody can find it/read it or change the focus, show some guts and lead with it on the feel good story. You can't just throw this in at the end of the feel good story and say out of nowhere, look what this guy did when he was 16.

p.s. I guess you also could completely ignore the tweet issue and in a week and a half when this guy's 20 minutes of fame expire you could write the hell out of the tweet issue. I'm not in favor of this route, either.

 

I try to imagine all my social media posts ending up on the front page of the NY Times.

As for the Busch Lite guy? If you discovered he had three DUIs or regularly posted videos of him puking his guts out from drinking too much on Twitter - yes, you run with that.

 

Honestly, and this is probably more an indication of my age and becoming an old fart softie, I think if I were the reporter that discovered these tweets, I would have contacted the individual and told him about them and told him to delete them immediately in confidence so he could be spared the Hell he was about to endure. I'm 100% sure those tweets don't represent the person he is today and I'm 99.9% sure he was joking (still stupid) when he posted them at 16 years age.

It just seems that this kid deserved a second chance. But, holy fuck damn, the moronic DMR was so damn stupid they mishandled it in every way possible. Another reason why I hate the media in 2019. It's more about hate, creating division, and clicks. Fuck the rest. So in a way, Frederick, I agree with some of what you said.

What a fantastic way to ruin such a fucking great story. Dumbasses.