What Do Post Dispatch Reporters and Penn State Have in Common?

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🕔 2 min read ∙ 278 words

Like the Penn State athletic department, most St. Louis news media covered up a sex crime in order to protect an organization they love.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch, KTVI 2 and KPLR 11, and KSDK 5 each failed to report a sexual assault that took place at the illegal OccupySTL squatters' village in Kiener Plaza last week.

The assault came to light only because a citizen-journalist, the POed Patriot, monitors the police crime map.  He blogged it.

Another citizen-journalist, Sharp Elbows, obtained police confirmation of the attack.

I’m trying to figure out why the Post Dispatch and every TV news channel except KMOV channel 4 covered up the attack.

OccupySTL is the local version of the number one news story in the country.  Search for Occupy stories on stltoday.com returns more than 3,000 entries. Yet the only mention of the sexual assault in St. Louis came from a citizen posting on a forum.

I realize that the failing business model of daily papers has resulted in fewer reporters to cover the news.  But this goes beyond  page space and time limits.  A sexual assault at OccupySTL is news–much harder than 90 percent of the stories that have appeared in the Post since the incident occured.

The various Occupy encampments across the country have produced more lice, TB, suicide, STDs, and murder than positive social change. A responsible news agency reports news associated with dangerous activities.

All of this raises another disturbing question: who many other OccupySTL crimes do the reporters know about?

P.S.  Kudos to KMOV News 4, the only newsroom in St. Louis with the guts to report bad stuff about the illegal occupation of Kiener Plaza.