The St. Louis Development Corporation is calling out KMOV over a short story they aired featuring the agency’s CEO, Neal Richardson. The development arm of the city accuses the CBS affiliate, also known as First Alert 4, of false and misleading coverage that “breaks the tenets of journalism.”
On Monday, KMOV had reported that state auditor Scott Fitzpatrick was conducting a preliminary investigation into how SLDC awarded ARPA-funded grants—a program that drew negative attention after the Post-Dispatch reported that some of the money intended for North City businesses appeared to be on its way to entities that weren’t businesses and not in North City.
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Then, on Tuesday, the station aired a curious follow-up, purportedly about SLDC responding to that development. It featured a 35-second clip of Richardson saying that the agency makes its decisions where to invest based on economic needs rather than politics—a statement that was fairly orthogonal to news of Fitzpatrick’s audit.
SLDC spokesman Deion Broxton says that’s because that footage was actually taken from an interview KMOV conducted for a story about SLDC helping a Black business, pegged to coincide with Black History Month. Richardson’s answer didn’t just seem like a non-sequitor, but in fact was a non-sequitor.
Broxton issued a press release Friday morning to various local media outlets, the NAACP St. Louis and the National Association of Black Journalists demanding KMOV issue a retraction.
The release says that after SLDC contacted KMOV, the reporter who had interviewed Richardson apologized, adding that the footage was used in context of the audit without their knowledge. Broxton added that he’d contacted station management several times asking for a retraction, but hadn’t gotten one. “It has been almost three days since the error occurred and KMOV has yet to issue a public retraction or give SLDC an indication to how it will respond,” the statement says.
KMOV executive director Scott Diener tells SLM the station will be letting viewers know that the clip they ran of Richardson “was not in response to the auditor’s probe” but about how SLDC operates more generally. Diener added: “The sound bite was innocuous and has no bearing on the Missouri state auditor’s probe.”
In typical St. Louis fashion, the dust-up is complicated by the fact that Broxton is a former KMOV reporter and last year Richardson got engaged to one of KMOV’s news anchors, Samantha Jones.
Broxton says he can’t comment on Richardson’s relationship with Jones. However, Broxton did say about his having just left KMOV in November: “It could have been any news outlet. Unfortunately, it was my former outlet. This is strictly professional.”
Says Broxton: “I want them to address to the public that they misrepresented Neal Richardson’s comments to them and to the Missouri State Auditor, and I want them to send a letter to the Missouri State Auditor acknowledging the error so it doesn’t taint the investigation.”
Asked if the station planned to do those things, Diener reiterated that the station was letting viewers know the sound bite was not in response to a question about the auditor’s probe. The station director added: “I wouldn’t know why we would contact the auditor’s office.”
Broxton also tells SLM he’s hoping the station’s retraction doesn’t come on a weekend, saying that he knows from experience those broadcasts get fewer eyeballs. “It would have been our preference if the statement or retraction had been issued Wednesday,” he says.
