On Saturday, Oklahoma Sooners quarterback Kyler Murray won the 2018 Heisman Trophy, capping off a remarkable season for a remarkable athlete.
On Sunday, USA Today ambushed Murray with a report highlighting impolitic remarks he made on Twitter when he was 15 years old. Why? Because this is a thing that a growing number of newsrooms do now. They wait for a star to rise only to see how quickly they can extinguish it by dredging up old, problematic social media posts.
“Old homophobic tweets from Kyler Murray’s Twitter account surface after he wins Heisman,” read the original headline to the USA Today report.
Well, no. The tweets didn’t simply “surface” from thin air in time for the awarding of the 2018 Heisman Trophy. Reporters dug into his adolescence and chose to write about these tweets, and editors who probably said worse things when they were high school freshmen (but not on Twitter) chose to publish them.
The real question is whether newsrooms knew about the tweets during Murray’s winning season and simply timed the story’s release for maximum damage and humiliation.
The USA Today story also leads with similar weasel-wording, reading, “Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray had a Saturday to remember. But the Oklahoma quarterback’s memorable night also helped resurface social media’s memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.”
It adds, “When Murray was 15 years old, he tweeted at his friends (via his since-verified Twitter account) using an anti-gay slur to defame them. Four offensive tweets remained active on his account late Saturday night but were eventually deleted by Sunday morning — when Murray apologized for his insensitive language in a tweet.”
USA Today wasn’t the only newsroom to use the Heisman award as an opportunity to report that a 15-year-old once said some bad things.
“NBC News: Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray apologizes for past anti-gay tweets,” read an NBC News headline. CNN added in a headline of its own, “Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray apologizes for old homophobic tweets.” USA Today has since updated its own story so that the headline now reads, “Kyler Murray apologizes for homophobic tweets that resurfaced after he won Heisman Trophy.” It’s cute that the headline now makes it sound as if the story was written merely in response to Murray apologizing, as opposed to being the thing that prompted the apology in the first place.
I’m with National Review’s Charles Cooke on this when he asks:
From my perspective, the trend of reporters ambushing rising stars over old and “problematic” social media posts has more to do with policing language and intimidating others than it has to do with providing readers with stories of actual news value.
Let’s be honest here: No one at USA Today thinks it’s newsworthy that a teenager said bad things online. They think it’s newsworthy that someone who once said bad things should be allowed to succeed. The “woke” activists in media know that they can’t control everything that is said online. But, by God, they can certainly make sure that anyone who has engaged in “problematic” speech will not be allowed to flourish without first being properly punished.
