YOU STAY CLASSY, DES MOINES REGISTER: Iowa Newspaper Refuses to Apologize for Trying to Ruin Carson King.
With a stench of arrogance that can only emanate from the news media, Des Moines Register executive editor Carol Hunter published a Thursday night column expressing no apologies for their campaign to ruin viral sensation Carson King “because readers depend on us to tell a complete story” and, as per her past statement, was done for “the public good.”
Hunter also revealed reporter Aaron Calvin was “no longer with the Register” after his ghoulish hatchet job against the cancer fundraiser over tweets King sent in high school, but the damage was done. As if they had let Jay Rosen or Brian Stelter pen this, she demonstrated a holier-than-thou proclamation from on high to us peons below that the paper will do better. Yeah right.
Read the whole thing.
BuzzFeed practically invented cancel culture, dating back to Andrew Kaczynski ginning up the Twitter mob to get Justine Sacco fired over a botched joke in 2013, and in 2017, now with CNN, doxxing a pro-Trump Twitter meme maker on the fourth of July. The firestorm that Sacco faced and other Twitter shame mobs are a topic of Glenn’s new book, incidentally. (BuzzFeed is still at it, of course.)
Yesterday, Robby Soave of Reason, who frequently writes about cancel culture, tweeted, “I just saw the phrase Mutually Assured Cancellation and it was revelatory.” Possibly from this Twitter thread:
Soave also retweeted Republican pollster Logan Dobson, who responded to the Des Moines Register’s link to Hunter’s disastrous column last night, “No, you idiots, you weren’t supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people’s dumb old tweets in the first place You did the stupidest thing at every possible turn.”