The Detroit Free Press decided to run a hit piece on an NFL coach. But sometimes, it’s difficult to control who gets canceled when engaging in cancel culture, and it predictably backfired.
The target was Dan Campbell, the New Orleans Saints assistant coach who is considered the front-runner to become the head coach of the Detroit Lions. See, in 1998, Campbell said he was proud to attend a university where “men like women and women like men,” in a comment designed to be an insult against a rival university. Campbell’s apology was published in a local newspaper a few days later.
So a college-aged Campbell made one “controversial anti-gay remark,” in the words of the Detroit Free Press, which he apologized for at the time. The incident was 22 years ago. And this is what the outlet considers to be a newsworthy story.
Normally, the decision to publish this ridiculous story would simply be mocked, and rightfully so. But the added wrinkle is that the author of the piece, editor Marlowe Alter, had his own history of controversial remarks. Rather than one remark made 22 years ago, like Campbell had, Alter repeatedly used slurs on his Twitter account as recently as eight years ago, which Twitter users were quick to point out.
It’s a similar story to one that played out last year. Carson King helped raise more than $1 million for the University of Iowa’s Stead Children’s Hospital, with the help of beer company Anheuser-Busch. The Des Moines Register then wrote a profile on King, searching through his Twitter account and finding that he had used the N-word twice, repeating jokes from a comedy show.
King then lost his sponsorship with Anheuser-Busch, thanks to the hit piece. It then turned out that the reporter who wrote the profile, Aaron Calvin, had also used the N-word repeatedly on his Twitter feed. Calvin ended up being fired by the Des Moines Register, bemoaning that bad-faith attacks led to his firing.
The King saga showed why canceling the cancelers is so important. It’s a reckoning that is desperately needed in sports media, where journalists stand by ready to tear down athletes and coaches at their highest moments with old tweets or comments from their teenage years. In this case, the Detroit Free Press tried to tear down Campbell as he is on the verge of becoming an NFL head coach.
The Detroit Free Press says it is investigating Alter’s tweets, and Alter issued his own (seemingly insincere) apology for getting caught. But this wasn’t the first time that this kind of hit piece has backfired, and it won’t be the last if media outlets keep trying to dig up far-gone events in people’s pasts to punish them for their successes.
