We Are Not Going to Show It

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FTVLive told you in a Patron Only story about the major backlash that has been leveled against Nexstar’s WCIA (Champaign, IL) for the way they covered a police-involved shooting in which two officers were shot and one of those officers died.

WCIA’s story on the shooting focused on the man that shot the officers. The suspect was also killed in the shooting, and many believe that WCIA focused more on the suspect and less on the cop that was killed.

The station has lost advertisers and faced harsh criticism from the community for its coverage.

Now Bodycam footage of the shooting has been released, and crosstown station WICS is not going to show the video.

WICS Reporter Matt Roy watched the footage and reported on what he saw. He then continued to try and put the toothpaste back in the tube and send out condolences to the officer’s family.

I get why the station did not want to air the video of the actual shooting, but why not air the bodycam video before the shooting started?

It seems that after the community blowback against WCIA has the other stations in town a bit scared as well.

Surely there we parts of this video that could be shown to viewers, to help clarify what happened on the day of the deadly shooting.

Below is the station’s coverage of the release of the video which contains no video, no graphics, no pictures, and just a Reporter telling us that he watched the video and he passes along his condolences.

I’m sorry, but this is not how Journalism is done.

The viewers of Champaign deserve better from their local news stations.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Roy worked at WCIA. He does not and our story was not correct. We have reposted the story with the corrected information.