The true story of two newsrooms who find out what happens when news stops being fake and starts getting real.
Two important reads today from the Columbia Journalism Review show the strong influence local news had on the violence and aftermath in Charlottesville.
Last Thursday, the Charlottesville Daily Progress published an editorial blaming Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, who called for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue—and who is the only black City Council member—for stoking the political firestorm that would ultimately end in violence and death:
Yet Virginia’s history of racial tension and legacy of systemic inequality never enters the frame of the editorial. For 755 words, the unbylined Progress editorial fixates on its authors’ myopic ideas of the park as separate from—and basically untouched by—history. It disputes the meaning of the symbols around which the rally was organized; at one moment, the editorial refers to “the park and the alleged white supremacy it represents.”
The racial symbolism of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate legacy is recognized by countless Charlottesville residents, as well as by those city councilors who voted to remove the statue. That symbolism is also recognized by the white supremacists who want the Lee statue to stay in place. Rather than address that symbolism and the history that charges it, the Progress’s editorial board isolated and then criticized a black man whose office requires him to voice the concerns of his constituents. How did we get here?
While reviewing photos from Charlottesville, a copy editor at the Blade in Toledo, Ohio, noticed the car James Fields, Jr., used to murder Heather Heyer had Ohio plates—with a registration tag denoting it was from Toledo. From there, reporters were able to identify Fields, and locate and interview his mother:
But first, they had to figure out who the driver was. “I put three reporters on it immediately, and they were searching everywhere,” says Dave Murray, the Blade’s managing editor. Through voter and vehicle registration records, he says, the Blade found that the car was registered in the name of James Fields, Jr., with an address in Maumee, a southern suburb of Toledo.
Hours before police announced Fields’s arrest and released his mugshot, Lauren Lindstrom, ordinarily a health reporter, was in Maumee to knock on doors. She felt cautious about misidentifying the driver—there had already been at least one social media-fed misidentification, and she was alert to the fact that the vehicle being registered in Fields’s name didn’t necessarily mean that he’d driven it. She wondered if there would be a police presence around Fields’s address, but there wasn’t. But her questions to neighbors on the small cul-de-sac where the car was registered didn’t bring much clarity.