The Des Moines Register fired a reporter who targeted a local hero for tweets from his teenage years, after the discovery of posts in which the reporter himself used the N-word.
“I want to be as transparent as possible about what we did and why, answer the questions you’ve raised and tell you what we’ve learned so far, and what we’ll try to do better,” Carol Hunter, the paper’s executive editor, said Thursday in a note to readers. “For one, we’re revising our policies and practices, including those that did not uncover our own reporter’s past inappropriate social media postings. That reporter is no longer with the Register.”
Aaron Calvin, the now-fired reporter, wrote a profile of local hero Carson King, who found overnight fame for a viral video in which he held a sign at a football game soliciting beer money. King, 24, decided to use his newfound fame to help donate over a million dollars to the University of Iowa’s Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
The Des Moines Register decided to write a profile of King, but during the process found two tweets from King’s teenage years that the paper deemed offensive.
The paper approached King, forced him to apologize, and Anheuser-Busch then cut off a partnership with King that they had planned because of his charitable deed.
National reporters and activists sent thousands of angry messages directed at the Des Moines Register over their attack on King. Soon after, Twitter users found that Calvin had two tweets in which he used the N-word.
The Register is aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts by one of our staffers, and an investigation has begun.
— Des Moines Register (@DMRegister) September 25, 2019
The Register responded and said they were investigating before eventually announcing they had fired Calvin.
