Cam Newton thinks female reporter talking routes is 'funny'

The whole "she tweeted in college" angle is bull. It wasn't that long ago!

I'm wondering why it even matters that she was in college when the tweets were posted. Like college students in their early 20s are so young and immature that they can't possibly be taken seriously. Is that it?

We don't have to know whether she was being sarcastic or not. When you are a journalist who covers black athletes and you've tweeted things that can be interpreted by many of those athletes and your readers as racist, it may not matter whether you are in fact racist.

 

I mean, occasionally they can, but for the most part they shouldn't.

 

That's a hard line. Maybe a hard one to live up to.

If only she'd had the foresight to be like us, and lobed hideous bombs behind the cover on anonymity.

 

I would have had a hard time getting a job if what I wrote -- actually published -- in college had been on the Internet.

If I'd had that kind of time bomb in my hands to display my drunk or otherwise not-fully-formed thoughts? Oh my goodness.

 

As a former working journalist and working musician, I cringe at the "columns" and "songs" I "wrote" in college, and wish they could be purged from the Earth.

 

I hope to God it's long been destroyed, but at one time there was a videotape of 7th-grade me, crooning during my school's spring talent show. The closeups, the emoting ... and the song: Olivia Newton John's I Honestly Love You.

 

I wonder if we'll hit a point where everyone has enough shit in their background, it's somewhat taken as a given. Like the way a president smoking pot was once a massive deal and now is not (shoot, presidents can get away with anything these days).

 

Yeah, if only she had. But she didn't, did she?

 

Hideous bombs? Oh, come now.

And we'd all be better off if we didn't breathlessly hang on what someone tweets.

 

You're so right with this statement, and it will largely go unnoticed. Social media, Twitter, Facebook, etc. has exposed our faults like nothing before. It's made us subject to extensive, harsh, and many times unfair criticism. We're finding out that we're all imperfect. We live in such an idealistic society that the truth has been very difficult to deal with.

 

Really? We have to crucify someone for a "bad look"? I didn't take it that her tweets were racist. She was definitely taking racism too lightly, but there's a difference, and it's sad that we have to settle for conflating the two things.

 

This brings up an interesting point, though. Young adults in their 20s have largely grown up with social media. They've surely heard about the posts on Facebook and Twitter that got someone fired or kicked out of school or traded from a professional sports team. This is their world.

You say you didn't have to deal with that. If you had, my guess is you would have had the good sense to carefully guard those not-fully-formed thoughts that are not meant for public consumption.