My Two Cents on the “Cotton Ball Incident”-Producer Perspective
What started for me as an alarming Facebook status update from a J-school alum has, no pun intended, woven itself into a complex story of race, journalism, and identity. I’m talking, of course, about what’s now called the “cotton ball incident” at MU. Let’s recap what we now today: At around 1 or 2 in the morning on Friday, February 28, someone threw cotton balls in front of the Gaines Oldham Black Culture Center. This spun into a firestorm of media coverage and university activism; hundreds of people attended a town hall meeting at the BCC on March 1 to discuss the issue. Later in the week, police arrested two white male MU students who they believe committed the act and charged them with second-degree tampering; as of now, they have apologized to the people they offended, and I have no clue if that counts as a confession.
But as a producer, the story doesn’t stop with these facts. If our job is truly to tell the story of our community, we have to make sure we use events like this to tell a complete story, even when the plot lines get tragic. But what’s the best way to tell the story of the cotton ball incident? And how much can we, as journalists, producers or people, put ourselves in the shoes of those most affected?
Frankly, one of the areas where I feel a lot of journalists, KOMU included, fell short in coverage of the incident is in honestly conveying the gravity of the situation. In short, it was too little too late. Specifically, on the day of the incident and in stories leading up to the town hall meeting, the media seemed squeamish about attributing the act to racism; KOMU did not air footage of the cotton balls, Chancellor Deaton’s e-mail to the MU campus did not mention “racism”, and the local newspapers did not put the act into context. As a result, the idiotic fringe of the audiences hijacked the story in some instances, doing everything from downplaying the act to finding it funny to crying “reverse racism” when the two kids were caught.
But now that the story about the incident itself seems to be winding down, enterprise stories about race and diversity-related issues seem to flood the newscasts. Just this week, I had to weave three stories directly stemming from the cotton ball incident into my newscast. While I’m thrilled these stories are finally being told and people are putting the idea of diversity in journalism to good use, where were these stories before? Why were reporters and producers so reluctant to pitch an enterprise story about the status of a diversity curriculum or the presence of minority business in mid-Missouri before this incident? Admittedly, now these stories have an element of timeliness built in to them, but ultimately, they’ve always had impact.
In the end, producers and journalists in general have to remain aware of developing profiles and dynamics in the community they cover; more often than not they’re going to lead to stories. And more often than not, those stories will not revolve around spot news, although it unfortunately may take spot news for people to care about them in the first place. But more often than not, once you find those stories, it is your responsibility to tell them so the community can experience their impact. That’s a crucial part of telling a story about a community in a day.
