Last week an incident of racial vandalism occurred outside the Black Culture Center on the MU campus. Cotton balls were thrown across the lawn around 1:30 am Friday Feb. 26th. Administrators at the Black Culture Center found the cotton balls on Friday morning and called police. This incident provided some interesting differences on how local television stations covered that crime. When the story broke on Friday morning, KOMU was the only station to cover the incident on their nightly newscasts without showing video or images of the cotton balls. Since we were the only news outlet to make that choice to withhold visuals, this week's Your View segment explains why our station chose not to show the video.
To show viewers why, I interviewed our news director Stacey Woelfel. His basic answer about our coverage reflected his opinion that by showing the racist display on television, we would only be delivering this message of hate to more people over our airwaves. I also interviewed Professor Charles Davis from the MU Journalism school and he agreed with KOMU's decision not to show visuals. Davis was extremely disappointed with the other news outlets for their actions and believes by focusing on the imagery rather than the impact and investigation of the incident, we are only "spawning more hate." After getting the interviews, my partner and I gathered the coverage that we did run to use as video, along with all of the follow-up coverage from this week about a meeting that was held to address the issue and the arrest of the two students who perpetrated the hate crime. After I was finished writing the script, it was approved and voiced by Sarah Hill and the editing process began. By noon on Friday, the segment was good to go for the 6 pm newscast. Here is the story-enjoy!
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