A reporter who was fired by the Des Moines Register over tweets containing the N-word after he exposed old teenage tweets from a local Iowa charitable hero responded to criticism by saying right-wingers are responsible for his firing.
“I recognize that I’m not the first person to be doxed like this — this whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues and largely driven by that force,” former reporter Aaron Calvin told Buzzfeed News on Friday. “It was just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time, but the kind of locality and regional virality of the story made it so intense.”
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He went on to claim he had received death threats and a tidal wave of harassment.
Calvin was fired Thursday after several tweets of his resurfaced that contained the N-word. His tweets were exposed after he did an interview with the viral local hero Carson King, who helped raise $1 million for charity. Calvin dug through King’s Twitter history and found that he had repeated two jokes from a show by comedian Daniel Tosh that Calvin found offensive. He then made King apologize before Anheuser-Busch pulled their sponsorship with King.
Other journalists, online activists, and local readers of the Des Moines Register were furious with the paper and Calvin over what they saw as the denigration of a local hero. Almost immediately, old tweets from Calvin were found in which he used the N-word. People called for the cancellation of subscriptions to the paper and mocked the reporter for what they said was hypocrisy.
Calvin claimed that his tweets were “taken out of context.” He also reaffirmed that he did the right thing by digging up King’s old tweets. “I knew if I found them, other people would find them as well,” he said. Calvin contended he was “abandoned” by the Register but said he still supports them.
