Firstly, let's start with a hypothetical sports media situation. Let's say, in 2011, there was a journalist who was working with Marca in Madrid who was from Madrid, covering the Real Madrid beat. We'll call him Pablo. Pablo's journalistic work, as you would expect, would often inevitably reflect a Madrista worldview (and given the partisan rancour of 2011, an anti-Barcelona bent). Let's also say that in his own personal capacities on social media, Pablo liked to criticise Puyol and Pique in colourful language. Now let's imagine that a vacancy for a football reporter at one of the national papers - El Pais say - opens up and Pablo gets the gig. Euro 2012 comes around and Pablo's work would always champion the play of Sergio Ramos and Xabi Alonso while paying notably less attention to the contributions of the Barcelona players. Let's say this reached absurd levels, such as Pablo stating that Albiol should start over Alba. Would not Spanish sports fans be interested in the previously-expressed derogatory feelings towards Barcelona players that Pablo in his previous position and wouldn't these feelings be relevant to how readers made sense of Pablo's contemporary work?
There is a strand of thought on Twitter that says Conor George was being wrongly hounded on social media for personal views expressed a year ago that have nothing to do with his current role as the Irish Independent's rugby correspondent. That is missing the point. For us, George's tweets on Heaslip are only relevant because they crystallise a very specific context: allegations of a pro-Munster/anti-Leinster bias in his writing on rugby. Our purpose of posting those tweets from a year ago was not to embarrass (though we admit that was perhaps inevitable), but to add another layer to this narrative. We're not the Twitter police and George's opinions wouldn't have mattered to us if he'd continued in his position as Cork Echo rugby writer in perpetuity. We do care about the national conversation around the Ireland team, and to that extent, opinions expressed on a public medium like Twitter during the previous Six Nations by the journalist writing for the most read newspaper in the country seem worthy of scrutiny.
