NFL free agent Donté Stallworth has landed a new job. However, it is not on the gridiron. The 2002 NFL 13th draft pick will now be tackling national issues through newspaper instead of tackling American football players. On Wednesday, the Huffington Post announced that they have hired the 33-year old wide receiver as their new beat reporter covering national security. Although known as a competitive player on the field, Stallworth also had his share of controversy, the most notable of which were his tweets back in 2009 regarding the Twin Tower attacks in September 11 of 2001. Those tweets branded hims as 9/11 truther and this part of his past filled the headlines of news sites that wrote about his new job with Huffington Post.
“9/11 Truther and DUI Manslaughterer Donte Stallworth Hired to be HuffPo’s New National Security Reporter” Crossboard wrote.
“Huffington Post hires ex-NFL player, 9/11 ‘truther’ Donte Stallworth to cover national security” the New York Daily News read.
Five years ago, he came under fire for his tweets.
"NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by 'dying' Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn't fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq," Stallworth tweeted in 2009.
NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by "dying" Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn't fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq
— Donte' Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) July 20, 2009
"Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11... hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives."
Politico's Ben White slammed this move by Huffington Post. Through twitter, he said that this is “the stupidest media stunts I've seen in a while. Embarrassing.”
In a statement, Huffington Post said that they hired Donte Stallworth for his passion for politics.
“Donte has a quick mind, an insatiable curiosity and a passion for politics — the necessary qualities of a great journalist,” Ryan Grim, the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, said in a statement.
When asked by Poynter's Andre Beaujon if they are not fazed by Donte's 2009 tweets, Grim said that the athlete is now a changed man.
“That doesn’t represent how he thinks today,” Grim said. “You know, that was five years ago, and people say dumb things, but that shouldn’t define him.” ... Journalism, Grim said, “is like football in the sense that it’s done in public and people are judged by how they perform on the field or in print.”
Stallworth himself also insisted that a lot of things have changed in his views from five years ago.
"I no longer feel the way I did in that tweet 5 years ago. ... After a lot of reading and researching on it, my views changed... and that's ok. ... Credit goes to James Bamford, whose great book disabused me of that stuff and showed what a disastrous intelligence failure 9/11 was,” he wrote on Thursday.
