Living in a Media World

Carson King and his sign asking for beer money.

You may have seen the heartwarming story about  Carson King, a young man who held up a sign at a recent University of Iowa / Iowa State University football game soliciting beer money. The sign, seen on ESPN’s GameDay, went viral on social media, and King ended up bringing in at least $600. (But stay with us, that number’s going to grow. And this story is going to end just fine for Carson King, but not for everyone involved.)

Once King realized how much money he had collected through the online money transfer service Venmo, he decided he needed to do something good with his windfall.  When he announced he was going to donate the money to University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Anhauser Busch and Venmo both pledged to match the money he had raised. Contributions then poured in, and although reports aren’t completely clear on this, it seems that the total amount raised rapidly exceeded $1 million. (But stay with us, that number’s going to grow.)  AB also was discussing using King as some kind of influencer, perhaps even putting his face on beer cans.

Here’s a story from ABC News that ran when the story was new.

The Des Moines Register had written about the King story when the story was breaking, and there was so much interest in King, the paper decided to do a full on profile.

As reporter Aaron Calvin worked on his article, it was mostly complimentary, but toward the end of it, he discussed a pair of racist jokes King had posted as a teen-ager.  Before publishing the story, Calvin called King to talk about the tweets.  King expressed regret to the reporter, and before the story was published, King had spoken with local TV stations about the tweets.  Interestingly enough, King did not complain about how he had been treated by the Register.

It’s worth noting that the offensive tweets, though written about in the Register, got very little play in the paper.  The TV stations running King’s apology, however, gave them big attention.

There were, of course, consequences to this story, but they weren’t necessarily predictable.

• Not surprisingly, Busch Light distanced themselves from King, although they still agreed to make their pledged contributions to the children’s hospital.
• Iowa Oktoberfest held in Waterloo, Iowa, removed Busch Light from their tap list for the annual festival in response to the brewer’s rejection of King.
• Iowa’s governor Kim Reynolds declared Saturday, Sept. 28th to be Carson King Day. “Carson King can showcase who we are as a people, not only by selflessly donating to a worthy cause, but spreading the message of generosity,” the governor’s proclimation  said.
• And the reporter who wrote the story for the Des Moines Register left the Register after the paper received hundreds of complaints about the story. (It also turned out that the reporter had had a few questionable tweets of his own year ago in his feed. These tweets were widely publicized by “influential right-wing media figures.” Soon after, Calvin started getting death threats.  The story about Calvin from BuzzFeed says he was fired from the Register.) You can get a feel for what the online environment was like by reading the comments from the television reporter’s tweet above.

There are a host of questions raised by this cautionary story:

• When should reporters dig into a subject’s social media history?  And what should they do with what they find? Josh Blackman, writing for the libertarian law blog The Volokh Conspiracy gives an in-depth look at the issue, considering a couple of cases.  Blackman concludes:Regrettably, the norm today is predictable: whenever anyone is thrust into the spotlight, for even the most insignificant reasons, an army of social media spelunkers climb through every crevice of the insta-celebrity’s timeline to find something–anything–to embarrass him. Conservatives do it to liberals. And liberals do it to conservatives. This circular firing squad needs to end–eventually, everyone can be cancelled. He that is without without social media sin among you, cast the first tweet.
  What, then is the relevance of old, offensive tweets? To be sure, these posts shed some light into a person’s views at an early juncture of his life. But I am generally skeptical they provide much insight into how they currently approach the world–especially when the postings are old, and were published before a person’s professional career began.How should our society weigh these old postings? I do not propose some sort of statute of limitations, in which past writings are off-limits. Rather, I suggest a different test: when a person’s established body of work is entirely inconsistent with, and indeed in tension with earlier postings, such nascent musings should be entitled to less weight. Under the opposite rule, everyone will be forever tainted by their worst moments. Our society should afford those aspiring for higher status the opportunity to grow, reflect, and recant.
• Did people over-react to the story about King’s two offensive tweets? Remember, while Mr. King did not get to continue to have a relationship with Busch Beer, he was lionized by Iowans and had the governor proclaim Carson King Day.  The Des Moines Register had people saying the paper should be driven out of business; the beer company was boycotted; the reporter got death threats.  My friend communications professor Brian Steffen, a life-long Iowan has posted his thoughts about this on his Facebook page:I should not have to say this, yet I will, again: The Register screwed up horribly re Carson King. Yes, it deserves criticism, plenty of it. But, no, no one deserves to die over this. And the Register certainly shouldn’t be pushed out of business after serving the city and state for the past 170 years.Cancelling your subscription to show your moral outrage — if you ever had a subscription to start with, by the way — will do nothing for you other than further push your communities and state into the cultural and inequality backwaters.
• How does the story end? The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that Carson King raised more than $2.9 million for University of Iowa Children’s Hospital. He donated all the money he raised, except for enough to buy one case of Busch Light.  What should be a happy ending.  If only it hadn’t made quite so many people quite so angry.

Want more on offensive social media posts coming back to haunt someone? See the story on Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn.

• Is there ever grace for being stupid on social media?