This will definitely get the blood boiling of the proud few of us who use the internet and still have common sense.
So, as you’ve heard by now, Carson King, a student at Iowa State got on College Gameday two Saturday’s ago with a sign promoting his Venmo account and asking for beer money. The “donations” to his beer money campaign came pouring in (no pun intended) soon afterward. Instead of actually using the money to buy beer, he donated it to Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. After that, he was featured in Scott Van Pelt’s “One Big Thing” and the story helped King raise over $1 million in donations for the Children’s Hospital. Anheuser-Busch partnered with him and made a large donation as well.
Feel good story with a happy ending, right? No, of course not. Because everyone on the internet sucks. Some so-called “journalist” hack from the Des Moines Register apparently had way too much time on his hands and started digging up Carson King’s tweets from like eight years ago. He apparently had two offensive tweets based off an episode of Tosh.O. The Des Moines Register for some reason thought that’d be a swell story to run thus causing Anheuser-Busch to act like pussies and announce they “cut ties” with King.
First of all, this whole situation is fucked and it unfortunately sums up our society so well. Someone does something well, they garner attention for it, and someone’s immediate reaction is to dig up dirt and tear the person down. We always do it to young athletes on draft day, now we’re doing it to people who are raising money for a children’s hospital? How did we stoop this low? Twitter is such a fun place but it really brings out the worst in people. Users will stop at nothing to direct attention to themselves, even if it means tearing someone else down in the process.
What makes this newest example of Cancel Culture so infuriating is that this wasn’t some internet troll, it was a legitimate newspaper. After well-deserved backlash, the Des Moines Register had to release a statement in a desperate attempt to save face. In their pathetic attempt to defend the release of this story, they stated that one of their reporters “did a routine background check on King that included a review of publicly visible social media posts, a standard part of a reporter’s work on a profile”. Fuck so far off. Searching eight years in the past for tweets is not a routine background check. You’re doing a story on a local hero for your shitty local paper, he’s not joining the FBI. And actively looking for negative tweets close to a decade old should not be a ‘standard’ part of the job for any reporter with a sliver of journalist integrity.
But wait, there is somehow more. Cancel Culture has somehow sank this thing even lower in the gutter. Aaron Colvin, the “reporter” who exposed poor Calvin King…HAD OLD TWEETS THAT WERE EXTREMELY OFFENISVE. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
https://twitter.com/txcyclones/status/1176705878558412803?s=21
Absolutely ridiculous that the Des Moines Register (God awful name for a paper) can call themselves a legitimate media source if this is how things are handled. In their ‘Note from the Editor’ released today that read “please don’t hate us”, they claim that they had SEVERAL Register Editors review this hit piece, scour over it, and then eventually give it the Green Light. When deeming it acceptable to run this piece on offensive, old tweets while never doing a background check into Colvin’s offensive, old tweets, the Des Moines Register destroyed any and all credibility they had as a newspaper.
Hopefully this is a lesson learned for social media users a whole. Stop tearing down young athletes for old tweets. Stop tearing down comedians for old tweets. For the love of God, stop tearing down college students raising money for children’s hospital for old tweets. People grow up. They mature. Believe it or not, Twitter use to be a reckless place where people didn’t find a reason to be offended at every turn. This bull shit “old tweets” trend has got to stop.