The Canceler Gets Canceled: Reporter Who Dug Up 8-Year-Old Tweets Of Local Hero OUT At Des Moines Register

It was announced Thursday by the Des Moines Register that reporter Aaron Calvin, who dug up 8-year-old offensive tweets of a local hero who raised over $1.14 million for sick children, was let go due to his own past social media posts. 

“Until readers called to our attention some inappropriate posts from several years ago, the Register was unaware of them,” the Register’s executive editor Carol Hunter said on Thursday.

“Employees of the Register are vetted through typical employment screening methods, which can include a review of past social media activity, but the screening processes did not surface those tweets. Register employees additionally must review and agree to a company-wide social media policy that includes a statement that employees ‘do not post comments that include discriminatory remarks, harassment, threats of violence or similar content.’ We also have policies that speak to our company values,” Hunter continued. 

“We took appropriate action because there is nothing more important in journalism than having readers’ trust,” she said of Calvin’s ouster. 

As covered by The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow on Wednesday, 24-year-old college football fan Carson King was highlighted by ESPN earlier in the month for a humorous sign he brought to a University of Iowa game. The sign jokingly asked viewers to Venmo him money so he could “replenish” his “Busch Light supply.” Instead of taking the thousands of dollars he raked in for himself, he used the opportunity to help others. By Wednesday, King collected more than a million dollars from strangers to help sick kids at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

When Calvin covered King’s impressive feat, he inexplicably included mention of tweets the football fan posted when he was just 16 years old, apparently related to the Comedy Central show “Tosh.O.” 

The backlash against the absurd “cancel culture” standard was swift. The Des Moines Register was bombarded with negative feedback for their coverage of King and readers demanded answers. The outlet shamefully blamed King for getting out ahead of the story and apologizing for the nearly decade-old tweets. The paper argued that it was their duty to cover the nearly decade-old tweets of the local hero.

Applying the same standard to the reporter, pundits and political accounts dug up offensive tweets from Calvin and pressed the Register for answers: if past tweets are relevant, shouldn’t Calvin’s far more recent offensive past tweets be made an issue?

Pushed into a corner, Calvin was let go by the paper. There has been no word on the editors who allowed the story on King to go to print, however. In fact, the paper defended the coverage of King’s old tweets when Hunter announced Calvin’s departure from the Register. 

“It weighed heavily on our minds that the racist jokes King tweeted, which we never published, were disturbing and highly inappropriate,” Hunter wrote. “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,” she said. “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.”