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People Who Have Glass Twitter Accounts...

Dave Rogers said:
Fallacy of the excluded middle, actually. About as perfect an example as one could hope for.

(Cue argument between those who think it's a classic example of the fallacy and those who think it's totally unrelated to it.)

Dave
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Read my previous post. My position is that no person is either good or bad.
 
Thermal said:
And what in the world is wrong with the reporter who thought something like this would be relevant? Is this supposed to be their big expose' that launches their career as an investigative journalist? And what was the editor who approved this thinking? 'Oh hellz ya, peeps luvs dirt! run it!'

Love to post the journalists' teenage dirty laundry in these things for perspective
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Indeed, it seems to be the fashion to assume that anyone who does something that appears nice must have skeletons in the closet, and that it's the duty of truth lovers to dig it up and prove they're not so good.

It would be just as easy, if not as big a scoop, for the reporter, on finding out the bad stuff, simply to remark that the kid grew up, and make the case that everyone should.
 
bruto said:
Indeed, it seems to be the fashion to assume that anyone who does something that appears nice must have skeletons in the closet, and that it's the duty of truth lovers to dig it up and prove they're not so good.
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Well, there *is* such a thing as whitewashing, which journalists are well within their scope to expose. Speaking truth to power and all. We're in the post Epstein, post Sackler, post Scientology charities world now.

We see whitewashing when the stakes are high... this is a milion dollar operation at this point.

However, yeah, I'm also sensitive to the fact that teen years are stupid years, and almost feel like anything before 18, with a 5 year waiting period, should be off limits. (meaning that a 15 year old probably should be held accountable for what he did last week, but a 23 year old has likely moved on a lot from when he was 18)



bruto said:
It would be just as easy, if not as big a scoop, for the reporter, on finding out the bad stuff, simply to remark that the kid grew up, and make the case that everyone should.
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Or discuss it with the kid first and shape the story into a chronicle of maturity and redemption, which would give parents of colossal douchebags (like he obviously was as a teenager) some hope. OR let the guy double down on it, and justifiably end his involvement.
 
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Darat said:
No sympathy for him at all, I never felt I needed to.post racist comments and jokes on my Twitter account when I was 16!
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That's probably because you are so much holier than he is or that you don't know a rather fun fact about human memory. We tend to forget that we ever believed anything differently than we currently do. You almost certainly would not remember if you did anything like that if you had. If you had, you probably wouldn't have thought of it as racist at the time.

Meh, probably none of that applies to you though.
 
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ahhell said:
That's probably because you are so much holier than he is or that you don't know a rather fun fact about human memory. We tend to forget that we ever believed anything differently than we currently do. You almost certainly remember if you did anything like that if you had. If you had, you probably wouldn't have thought of it as racist at the time.

Meh, probably none of that applies to you though.
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Think about it for a sec. How old is Darat?
 
Dave Rogers said:
I'm relieved that, now Geocities is dead and gone, nobody will ever discover the awful truth about my model aircraft collection.

Dave
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When I was a young lawyer I had an interest in a field of law that was a bit outside of the area I practiced in. Good professor actually got me interested in something that was never going to make me any money, such a dick. Anyway, I participated in some discussion boards relating to that area.

Fast forward a year or two and my paralegal comes in with a stack of my posts from that discussion board laughing about how hilarious it would be if Partner Bob in our firm found out I turned down work from him not because I don't know the area well, but because I just happen to disagree with all of his clients.

She was funny. We had a really good relationship. There is no way she was blackmailing me. And yet the blood in my veins went ice cold. All I could think of was trying to explain to my pregnant wife that the closing for our new house may be a bit rocky since I just lost my job over some stupid posts to a discussion board that has nothing to do with my practice area. The paralegal saw this in my face, apologized and shredded the printouts. I never posted anything on the internet under my own name or a consistent "handle" ever again. Partner Bob left the firm before I did.
 
What amuses me is the way people think deleteing a tweet they sent from their account will erase it. Once you push the send button, it is out there forever,no matter what you do.
 
bruto said:
Indeed, it seems to be the fashion to assume that anyone who does something that appears nice must have skeletons in the closet, and that it's the duty of truth lovers to dig it up and prove they're not so good.

It would be just as easy, if not as big a scoop, for the reporter, on finding out the bad stuff, simply to remark that the kid grew up, and make the case that everyone should.
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Well we don't have a lot of evidence either way that his views have changed or not.
 
Brainster said:
This one's almost too rich for words.

Basically, young man at college football game holds up sign asking for more beer money and including his Venmo account name. Sign gets shown on ESPN's gameday, and whaddya know, a day or so later young man discovers that there's $600 in the account. So he does the right thing, he decides to donate the money to the local children's hospital. His mom mentions this on Facebook and the whole thing explodes. Venmo and Busch (he mentioned Busch Light on his sign) offered to match whatever the kid raised, and before you know it, he's on Good Morning America, CNN, Fox and Friends, NBC, etc. Raises over $1 million for the children's hospital.

Kind of a local hero, right? Well, a reporter named Aaron Calvin for the Des Moines Register, decides to do some investigoogling, and discovers, shock of shock that the young man had said some racist things as a teenager (16). I can't seem to copy from the site, but it says that he tweeted two racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another "making light of black people killed in the holocaust (sic)."

Obviously objectionable, but seriously if you have to go back eight years to a sophomore in high school's account to find something stupid and objectionable, I'm already thinking the kid must be a saint. But as usual, it gets better. Because of course the reporter had a long-time twitter account, some rather embarrassing tweets of his were discovered:



Whoops!
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This is why I'm glad I have never made any statements on the internet that anybody could misconstrued as racist or hateful.
 
blutoski said:
Well, there *is* such a thing as whitewashing, which journalists are well within their scope to expose. Speaking truth to power and all. We're in the post Epstein, post Sackler, post Scientology charities world now.

We see whitewashing when the stakes are high... this is a milion dollar operation at this point.

However, yeah, I'm also sensitive to the fact that teen years are stupid years, and almost feel like anything before 18, with a 5 year waiting period, should be off limits. (meaning that a 15 year old probably should be held accountable for what he did last week, but a 23 year old has likely moved on a lot from when he was 18)


Or discuss it with the kid first and shape the story into a chronicle of maturity and redemption, which would give parents of colossal douchebags (like he obviously was as a teenager) some hope. OR let the guy double down on it, and justifiably end his involvement.
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True, if we surmise that the journalist in question was reasonably hard working and actually had an interest in....what's the word I'm searching for....oh, yeah, "journalism."

ponderingturtle said:
Well we don't have a lot of evidence either way that his views have changed or not.
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True enough, but that's largely because the journalist in question did not bother to find out. While it's true that some of us will never change, it's no big stretch of the imagination that many of us did some dumb things in our youth that we would happily get past now, and it's a disservice to everyone when that is prevented.
 
bruto said:
True, if we surmise that the journalist in question was reasonably hard working and actually had an interest in....what's the word I'm searching for....oh, yeah, "journalism."
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Just to clarify: they started out doing an ordinary profile, and social media review is SOP. The author worried about the relevance of what he'd found, and brought it to the journalism editor at the paper. The editor's decision was to include it in the interest of transparency, it was in a sidebar, not part of the original article.

My impression is that yes, the author was interested in ordinary journalism, and tripped over something unexpected while conducting a routine profile.



bruto said:
True enough, but that's largely because the journalist in question did not bother to find out. While it's true that some of us will never change, it's no big stretch of the imagination that many of us did some dumb things in our youth that we would happily get past now, and it's a disservice to everyone when that is prevented.
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The dilemma they had was to run what they knew or abandon objective journalism and become 'part of the story' by suppressing relevant information from the readers for personal reasons. King didn't respond to their inquiries, so they decided to go with what they felt was full transparency and let the readers decide what to do with the information. King says he regrets ignoring their attempts at outreach.

I don't know if I would have postponed publishing indefinitely hoping King would respond either. In any case, when the deadline came up, no response from King, they published what they had.

King has been in damage control since, and it was avoidable on many levels.


My opinion is that Calvin was indeed conducting acceptable journalism. The attacks on Calvin specifically digging up his past are the ones with an agenda.
 
I disagree. His past comments don't seem to have anything to do with the story of him raising money for charity so there was no journalistic reason to include facts which were not pertinent to the story.
 
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