So last night the Des Moines Register newspaper has became the nations punching bag , because they suck. To many of us Iowans this is nothing new.

So in case you haven’t heard the Des Moines Register decided they needed to go digging into one of the best feel good stories to ever come out of Iowa and ruin it. Here’s a quick breakdown if you haven’t seen it. Carson King held a sign on the Game Day College Football show asking for donations for beer. Once he hit donations for more beer than he could drink, around $1,600, he announced that he was going to buy a case of beer and donate the rest to the University of Iowa Childrens hospital. Busch Light announced that the would match all of his donations and made a can with his face on it. He then went on a media tour. He seemed like the nicest kid ever and raised over 1 million dollars for the hospital.

Well all of this goodness was too much for the Des Moines Register to handle so they decided to investigate him. One of their Journo’s found tweets from 7 years ago, when King was 16 that, “were highly inappropriate.” They told him they were going to publish what he had said. He held a press conference saying he was sorry and wrote later that the tweets were about jokes from the Tosh.O T.V. show. Busch Light severed ties with him.

Well now that it was obvious that the Des Moines Register had purposefully ruined one of the best feel good stories to ever come out of their state. The internet rose up and did what it does. Some people on Twitter looked into the jackass writer, Aaron Calvin, that investigated King and,boy, did they find some, “highly inappropriate” tweets. Here are the two that topped the list.

There were many more. He shut down his Twitter. The Register has said they are looking into it and right now I assume everyone at the paper is crapping their pants as the angry emails, and social media posts from all over this great nation come rolling in. One can only hope they are accompanied by subscription cancellations.

The funny thing about the damage control is the first line of the statement the Register put out, “Some of the toughest decisions in Journalism are about what to publish— or not.” This reminded me of something. Something years ago when other newspapers made a decision not to publish the Register made the decision to publish.

In 1991 Jeffrey Dahmer chopped up a bunch a fellas in Milwaukee. He ate some of them and stuck them in his fridge. When the police found him and the story was reported it shocked and horrified the nation that such a monster exists. Well, a couple weeks after the story broke, while the families were still mourning the dead, and the nation was still coming to grips with the story. The Des Moines Register decided to publish this ad for PETA:

So in terms of decisions to publish, at a time when other papers refused to publish this garbage. The Register thought it was a good idea to publish an ad that compared all meat eaters to a murderous, cannibal and all of Dahmer’s victims to animals. Up until today that was maybe the dumbest, “decisons to publish” ever. Just like today it became a national story as the anger towards them exploded.

Over the years there has been plenty of other times that the Register has proved itself to be one of the worst hack rags out there, but now the times, they are a changing. In 1991 if you lived in central Iowa and wanted the local news on your doorstep in the morning, there was pretty much one source, and the Register survived. Now that has all changed and everyone has more news than they would ever need in there pocket at all times.

Its a story about decisions. The writer Aaron Calvin could have said privately to Carson King, “Hey man, we found some stupid Tweets from when you were in High School you might want to get rid of.” but he didn’t. He decided to put it in the story and the editor decided to publish. What the Register doesn’t realize is this is not about a publishing decision. Its about the age old decision of right or the wrong. Helping a guy continue to raise money for sick kids, or stopping him from doing so. The Register made the wrong decision, hopefully their current customers make the right one.

P.S. Carson King is still raising money through Venmo @Carson-King-25

The Des Moines Register Has Always Sucked