Читать книгу The Ethical Journalist - Gene Foreman - Страница 75

WHEN ESPN BROUGHT its lighthearted “College GameDay” show to Ames, Iowa, before the Iowa-Iowa State football game on September 14, 2019, a 24-year-old casino security guard decided to join the fun.

With a Sharpie and a piece of poster board, Carson King created a sign to hold up while standing in the crowd. ESPN’s cameras captured his sign asking people to send donations to his Venmo money transfer app so he could replenish his supply of Busch Light.

Over the next two weeks, King’s gag set into motion a cascade of surprises:

 People liked his sign, and donations for his beer fund quickly started rolling in.

 When the total reached $600, King announced that rather than buying beer, he would donate the money to a local children’s hospital.

 The appeal went viral on social media, prompting Anheuser-Busch and Venmo – the brands named on King’s sign – to promise to match whatever King raised.

 Donations passed the million-dollar mark, and The Des Moines Register assigned its trending-news reporter, Aaron Calvin, to write a profile of social media’s new hero.

 Calvin, perusing King’s social media accounts as part of his research, found two racist jokes King had posted as a 16-year-old. When Calvin interviewed King about the posts, he immediately expressed remorse.

 King then called a news conference to apologize publicly for the posts, even though The Register had not yet published its story. Anheuser-Busch cut its ties with King but promised to honor the $350,000 it had pledged to that point.

 The Register decided to go ahead and publish the profile Calvin had written about King, essentially a laudatory piece that briefly mentioned the offensive posts near the end.

 In angry posts, the social media community blamed Calvin and The Register for embarrassing King and interfering with a charity fund-raiser. In a campaign Calvin said was orchestrated by “right-wing activists and pundits,” the reporter was assailed for his own posts, made when he was 18 years old. As Calvin described them, the criticism involved “an off-color joke about same-sex marriage”; “a post quoting a rap lyric verbatim, a lyric which happened to include the n-word, which is something I wouldn’t do today”; and “a disparaging comment about the police in general.”

 In the face of threats, The Register hired extra security to guard its offices and offered Calvin a hotel room for his safety.

 Calvin instead decided to stay at a friend’s place, and it was there that he received a phone call from the human resources department of Gannett, The Register’s owner, telling him to decide between resigning or being fired. He chose to be fired.

This case illustrates a social media phenomenon called “cancel culture.” It also illustrates how emphatically news consumers can register their disapproval of news coverage in the digital age.

Calvin’s detractors were contending that his profile “canceled” King – imposing a kind of censure. The detractors, in response, “canceled” Calvin.

In an essay in The New York Times in 2020, Jonah Engel Bromwich analyzed cancel culture. (He approached the subject in the abstract, not in connection with this case.) Bromwich traced the concept of cancel culture from a joke on Black Twitter to a new meaning in which cancel described “a dynamic frequently playing out on social media. A person would say or do something that was offensive to others, and those people would call out the offender.” Because the phenomenon could turn punitive, Bromwich wrote, cancel culture offers “a glimpse into how social media has scrambled the way that power is distributed.” Bromwich assessed the phenomenon’s pluses and minuses: “Social media allows people to band together to hold institutions and people accountable, and to challenge dominant narratives. Can groupthink on social media have bleak consequences as well as inspiring ones? Yes. … [S]ocial media, and Twitter in particular, is not an ideal venue for hosting complex conversations about nuanced issues.”

The Iowa case exemplifies those nuanced issues. When The Register decided to do its profile of King, Calvin checked the profile subject’s social media postings as part of a larger examination of King’s life story. Calvin said later that such a check was a standard procedure for The Register, and he also was instructed by an editor to make the check.

Carol Hunter, The Register’s editor, wrote a column about the episode on September 27, 2019, emphasizing that there was no intention to disparage King. She then explained how the staff produced profiles about people in the news:

[R]eporters talk to family, friends, colleagues or professors. We check court and arrest records as well as other pertinent public records, including social media activity. The process helps us to understand the whole person.

Hunter then addressed how The Register’s editors decided whether to mention the old social media postings in the profile of King:

It weighed heavily on our minds that the racist jokes King tweeted, which we never published, were disturbing and highly inappropriate. On the other hand, we also weighed heavily that the tweets were posted more than seven years ago, when King was 16, and he was highly remorseful.

We ultimately decided to include a few paragraphs at the bottom of the story. As it turned out, our decision-making process was preempted when King held his evening news conference to discuss his tweets and when Busch Light’s parent company announced it would sever its future ties with King.

Hunter also discussed how The Register vetted job candidates. She wrote that the company uses “typical screening methods, which can include a review of past social media activity,” but this screening had not surfaced Calvin’s nine-year-old postings. After noting that Register employees are forbidden to post “…comments that include discriminatory remarks, harassment, threats of violence or similar content,” Hunter wrote: “We took appropriate action because there is nothing more important in journalism than having readers’ trust.”

In an essay headlined “Twitter Hates Me” on November 4, 2019, in Columbia Journalism Review.

Calvin defended checking King’s social media postings as an act of responsible journalism: “If I found the tweets, others would, too. I approached King with an understanding that what you tweet in high school is not necessarily representative of your beliefs as an adult, and he duly apologized.”

Calvin wrote that, despite his assurances to King in their interview, “he was worried about personal blowback. As is common in the world of celebrity PR, he moved to get ahead of the details that would be revealed in the profile.” Calvin thinks that is what led to King’s news conference in which he revealed the old tweets and apologized for them.

Calvin described what happened next:

Immediately after he released his statement, angry messages began to come in to The Register’s Facebook pages. The messages demanded that the identity of the journalist who had found King’s tweets be revealed, and threatened the reporter’s life and the lives of Register staff. The Register decided to publish my profile that night, and King tweeted that he bore the paper no ill will, but it was too late. The narrative that a Register reporter was trying to discredit Carson King had already been set in motion.

In the hours after King’s statement, people on Twitter found material that they used to discredit me, instead. They shared offensive tweets that I’d posted when I was younger, including statements that were meant sarcastically but that employed homophobic and misogynistic language. … Tweeting those things was a mistake, and I apologize for them.