The News Director Hung Up on Me

Alex Pareene was reading KCTV (Kansas City’s) website where he came across a story that didn’t seem quite right.

He writes that the station put out a very dramatic story about a police officer’s seeming brush with death.

The headline was: “‘I knew I was dying’: How 5 rounds of Narcan possibly saved KCK police officer’s life.” The “possibly” is pretty important there, because in reality, an overdose would’ve been stopped by one round of Narcan, and a fentanyl overdose is exceedingly unlikely to occur from incidental physical touch.

If that was how it worked, that is how users would ingest it, and first responders suffering from effects of exposure would stop breathing, not get short of breath. This is all pretty basic stuff that ER doctors and nurses and medical experts of various stripes attempted to share in the responses to KCTV5’s official account and the account of the lead reporter of the story, to no avail.

Pareene tweeted the station and followed up with an email, asking where they got their facts, because to him, and medical experts, they were wrong.

The station never got back to him, so, he followed up with a phone call. He got KCTV News Director Kate Glover on the phone.

It did not go well.

Pareene writes:

The news director confirmed that she did receive and read my email, and said they hadn’t decided yet whether they would follow up on the story again. So, while I had her on the line, I figured I’d just directly ask my questions. (I didn’t record the call so this is not an exact transcript.)

“We were telling the story of the person it happened to,” she said.

“Well,” I asked, “what do you do when people with expertise tell you what a person says happened to them is impossible?”

“People who weren’t there, you mean?” she responded.

As I attempted to reframe the question, to ask whether literally any medical expert—a doctor, pharmacologist, or toxicologist—had been consulted in either the original reporting or the editor’s note, I was politely hung up on.

Not sure hanging up on a viewer is the best public relations for the station, but hey, who knows.