St. Louis Journalists Disagree Over Mizzou Media Blockade

“I need some muscle over here!”

A day after peaceful demonstrations at the University of Missouri in Columbia forced out the president and chancellor, one video is all anybody’s talking about.

The video has nothing to do with the tense racial climate that drove students to protest in the first place: repeated cases of racial slurs, a swastika drawn with feces in a dorm, cotton balls left at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center. No one in the video speaks to the students’ victory, the school’s future, or similar struggles at other schools.

Instead, as all eyes turned to Columbia to watch the movement that was reignited in Ferguson spur changes at the university, what they found was a white, tenured communications (note: not journalism) assistant professor, Melissa Click, calling for “muscle” to stop a photojournalist of color from reporting on a public gathering.

Click’s treatment of student cameraman Mark Schierbecker “was definitely embarrassing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist (and Mizzou alum) Benjamin Hochman said on The Ryan Kelley Morning After show on Tuesday. “My alma mater looked bad nationally for a lot of reasons. And [Click] ain’t helping.”

Just like in Ferguson, where reporter arrests dominated stories from the international press corps, journalists have become one of the most viral stories from the Mizzou protests.

Media blockades also popped up during the Ferguson unrest, when protesters tried to shield their plans and strategies from the media so police, the target of their protests, couldn’t intercept them. One activist was beaten at a private organizing meeting simply because other protesters thought he might have been live-streaming. In the heat of the protests, stories of journalists being arrested or attacked weren’t uncommon.

So when Mizzou students stopped Mariah Stewart, the Huffington Post Ferguson fellow working alongside St. Louis American staff, she counted her blessings.

The similarities between the Mizzou media blackout and similar efforts during Ferguson protests are more than just coincidence, Stewart says. Activists who orchestrated the Occupy SLU demonstrations last year came to Mizzou to help the protests and suggested to leaders that they control response to the media.

“They said they were the ones who told the organizing student group Concerned Student 1950, ‘Hey, don’t talk to the media. This is your power, and you can control it,’” Stewart tells SLM. Stewart says none of the activists were willing to go on record about their role in the Mizzou protests.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer Robert Cohen, a member of the the Pulitzer Prize-winning photography team that covered the unrest in Ferguson, also said the media blockade gave him Ferguson flashbacks. In a Twitter conversation with The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery, one of the reporters arrested inside a Ferguson McDonald’s during a break in the protests, he marveled at how physical the students and faculty blocking reporters were.

But when it comes to access, journalists can’t just blame the activists pushing reporters back, Stewart says. After spending a week camping out on a campus quadrangle with very little national media coverage, Monday’s news brought a swarm of reporters.

Stewart said one activist she was interviewing described foul-mouthed, rude cameramen from outside Missouri pushing their way into the protest camp.

“She said that was the first encounter when they were like, ‘Ugh, we are over it,’” Stewart says. “That’s when they were really enforcing no media at all. I wasn’t surprised when I heard about it. Media can be rude, just as much as the subjects we cover.”

Rebecca Rivas, who extensively covers Ferguson and civil rights for the St. Louis American, got into a different kind of Twitter conversation with Lowery while arguing that reporters should give students space after a difficult, week-long protest to oust university leadership.

While Rivas keeps her focus on today’s students, Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson keeps his trained on the students and children of the future. Without access to the story, Carson says in a Twitter rant, future generations won’t get the full picture, especially the visual picture, of a momentous and historic day in Mizzou history.

But in the Post-Dispatch newsroom, Mizzou protesters’ efforts to stop, block, and push reporters left, as Hochman put it, “a bad taste in many journalists’ mouths.”

Regardless of how Mizzou protesters and the media interacted Monday, Tuesday will likely be different. Here’s the PSA that protesters are passing out around campus:

Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at [email protected] or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.