Entire Staff of Des Moines Register-Founded Bike Ride Across Iowa Resigns In Protest Over DMR's Scalp-Hunting of Good-Guy Carson King; Will Start Their Own Bike Challenge

America to the Media: You're fired.

The now-resigned director of the biking challenge explained that while the DMR absolutely refused to answer questions about their Scalp-Hunting of Carson King, they had the balls to issue pro-DMR-spin talking points to the bike challenge staff about how to answer questions about it.

So the director quit, and the staff quit with him.

And now the DMR will not be the organizer of a major amateur sporting event.

Found via Iowahawk, who tweets, "This is one hell of a shoe drop: the entire RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) staff resigns en masse in protest over the DMRegister's Carson King fiasco, will start a new event with no affiliation to the paper," adding, "For you non-Iowans, let me explain that this is a Big F'ing Deal. RAGBRAI has been a beloved state institution since 1973, attracts tens of thousands of riders, and is a major source of goodwill for the Register. This is a major kick in their nuts."

Meanwhile, Mark Hemingway points out that Twitter is grappling over the problem of people's old tweets being searched for in order to scalp them. Wait, did I say they were worried about people's tweets being used to scalp them?

My mistake: Twitter is only concerned about journalists being scalped in this way. They're afraid that this might make journalists afraid to tweet.

Meanwhile, journalists can go on using Twitter as a Scalp-Hunting treasure map, because Twitter likes that. Fuck non-journalists. They're barely human.

From Ed Driscoll's write-up at Instapundit:

I would love to set all my tweets to just go private after a year, basically. And the reason is just that cultural standards change enough that I either have to delete all of the tweets on a regular basis or I could just set them private, right? Because we’ve now seen bad actors sort of digging into peoples’ old tweets, taking them out of context and wreaking all kinds of havoc. So, I would just love a way to never have to think about that again, basically…

I mean, journalists’ careers end because someone digs up an old tweet, you know?

Oh no we can't have people Scalp-Hunting the Scalp-Hunters. That would be totally unconstitutional or something.

By the way, there's a name for "bad actors" who go searching someone's twitter history to do a gratuitous and cruel, but easy and clickbaity, hit piece: we call them "journalists."

"Journalists" have been doing this for years.

Now someone's doing it to "journalists" and oh no it's a Moral Panic twitter must fix right now.

Flashback: that time the Russians invented time-travel and used it to hack Joy Reid's blog years before, to insert 9/11 truther conspiracy theories and antisemitic and anti-gay dog-whistles.

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:46 PM

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