The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
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told them, not questioning anything. Trade publications and smaller newspapers were alarmingly willing to take my writing and publish it as fact. My news releases often were printed word for word as news stories by publications short of help and eager to fill space. I could have written self‐serving drivel, and readers would not have had any way to know it.
And it was a great surprise to learn how many reporters, particularly those who consider themselves specialists, came to interviews with an obvious bias. They had already drawn a conclusion and were simply collecting facts to dress it up. A telltale sign was questioning intended to back the interviewee into a corner: “Don’t you agree that …?” “Isn’t it true that …?”
Even worse were those who tried to push their own words onto the unwitting subject. I warned executives to be wary of any reporter who said, “So, what you’re saying is ….” or “In other words, ….” That was a red flag that the reporter was choosing the words he or she wanted to attribute to the subject.
We found that many reporters want stories to be black or white. Good guys or bad guys. Right or wrong. The truth is that most events are in shades of gray and need to be presented in perspective. That was particularly difficult when working with television reporters, who hate anything gray because it takes too much time on the air to explain.
The most challenging situation for us was to continue to work with reporters we knew to be lazy or to have a strong point of view. The best was the opportunity to work with reporters who were prepared, ready to listen, willing to learn, and balanced and fair in their stories. Fortunately, there were plenty of them.
28They had already drawn a conclusion and were simply collecting facts to dress it up.
Case Study: A Stunt Becomes a Good Story, but Backfires on Its Writer
A Journalist’s Trial by Social Media
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.