controversial tweets made by Carson King, a 24-year-old Iowa man whose beer sign on ESPN College GameDay resulted in over $3 million in contributions to a children's hospital. King was 16 at the time of the posts. According to Carol Hunter, the paper's executive editor, the Register elected to include the information toward the end of a story about King. "Reasonable people can look at the same set of facts and disagree on what merits publication. But rest assured such decisions are not made lightly and are rooted in what we perceive as the public good," she explained after receiving complaints from readers. Some readers later found social media comments previously made by the reporter, Aaron Calvin, which contained racial slurs and condemnation of law enforcement. The Register defended its decision and announced that they would launch an investigation into the "inappropriate social media posts" made by a staff member, though it did not name anyone involved. On September 27, the Register announced that Calvin was no longer employed by the newspaper. Calvin later wrote an op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review blaming Gannett and the Register for what he considered to be an "unfair" firing. In October 2022, the Register was discovered to have provided commercial printing services to a "pink slime" media client, Local Government Information Services, which the Columbia Journalism Review describes as publishing "multiple misleading, decontextualized, and often nonfactual stories on hot-button issues in Illinois." Editorial philosophy In the three decades before the Cowles family acquired the Register in 1903, the Register was a "voice of pragmatic conservatism." However, Gardner Cowles Sr., who served as a Republican in the Iowa General Assembly, was a delegate to the 1916 Republican National Convention, and served in the administration of President Herbert Hoover, was an advocate of progressive Republicanism. The new owners presented a variety of viewpoints, including Darling cartoons that frequently made fun of progressive politicians. During the Cowles family's ownership, the Registers editorial page philosophy was generally more liberal in its outlook than editorial pages of other Iowa newspapers, but there were notable exceptions. The publishers strongly supported Republican Wendell Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign against Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. The newspaper also supported Republican Dwight Eisenhower's campaigns for the Republican nomination and general election in 1952, and again in 1956. Although the Register endorsed presidential candidates Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Jimmy