ROD DREHER ON BAD BEER + BAD JOURNALISM:

Why did the newspaper do this? Why hold this poor guy up for community contempt over two things he tweeted when he was a 16-year-old? It’s wrong, and readers were right to drag the paper.

But get this: amid the controversy, the paper discovered that Aaron Calvin, the reporter who outed King as a teenage HATER, had himself tweeted offensive things when he was a teenager. According to the Washington Post:

Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.

By late Tuesday night, Calvin began deleting old tweets, and then locked his account early Wednesday morning after posting an apology.

And then the paper fired him! Which is just wrong. They shouldn’t have exposed the idiotic tweets of a 16 year old who, eight years later, was remorseful, and which had absolutely nothing to do with the good works that brought him fame. And they should not have fired the reporter. It is possible that the reporter went to his editors with the information he found, and they made the call to include the information in the newspaper, under his byline. It sounds like Carol Hunter and her team are scapegoating Aaron Calvin.

As Dreher writes, “I’m just so very, very happy that Twitter and other forms of social media did not exist when I was in high school.” Sadly, it did by the time Calvin was a journalist. QED: