Four years ago, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis shocked the whole globe. It led to global protests, outrage, and discussions of racism in many countries, including my home country Finland.
On May 25, 2020, former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for 10 minutes, despite Floyd repeatedly saying he could not breathe. Chauvin continued until Floyd died, while three fellow officers looked on without intervening.
It was an event with consequences the local Minneapolis-based TV station KSTP would continue to report on for months to come. For the channel’s editors and journalists, it meant pressure, emotional stress, and difficult journalistic choices. During our visit to the channel, the reporters mentioned the event as one of the most demanding news events they had faced in recent years.
During our visit KSTP’s News Director, Kirk Varner told us that he was awakened early on the morning of May 26, 2020, by a phone call from the channel’s executive morning producer. The producer had been in discussions with the Darnella Frazier, a young woman who had filmed Floyd’s arrest and death on her phone on the night of May 25. Video had been circulating in social media, but not yet published in the mainstream media.
The video was challenging the official police narrative of the events, as the first statement of Floyd’s death released by the Minneapolis Police Department said nothing about Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck and called Floyd’s death a “medical incident”.
Frazier was at first reluctant to share the video with the media, but eventually she agreed to share it with KSTP’s reporters. That was the moment when the channel needed to decide whether they should broadcast the video of someone being killed or not.
“However, we decided it was essential for the audience to see all the events so they could understand the sequence of the events and what really happened,” Varner says four years later to us.
KSTP ended up being one the first TV stations that published the whole video of Floyd’s murder.
That was not the end of the story, as we all know now. Varner tells us that KSTP’s reporters spent next month’s reporting on both the aftermath of the death, protests, discussions of the racial injustice, police department’s aftermath and eventually, the verdicts of the police officers responsible for Floyd’s death. That was emotionally challenging for the channel’s journalists, especially when everything was happening in their own home city.
In 2021, KSTP-TV was named a winner of the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia award for its coverage of the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed. A news release announcing the award mentioned that KSTP produced courageous coverage of one of the biggest stories of the year, maintaining a commitment to its hometown viewers. However, the struggle for justice and equality is also the continuing story that KSTP is continuing to cover, as Kirk said while accepting the award in 2021.
Unfortunately, problems of police brutality and racism still prevail in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Floyd’s death led more than 30 states to pass several police reform laws. Yet, according to Statista, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans is still much higher than that for any other race. According to Amnesty International, “racism and discrimination are ingrained in global law enforcement and justice systems, from racial profiling and biased police checks to selective drug enforcement and broad anti–terror laws.”
Therefore, it is also a topic which we journalists should keep an eye on and keep reporting about.
