Oakland, CA – KTVU and anchor Frank Somerville failed to mention white supremacy in the station’s coverage of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings. Oakland journalist Davey D Cook made that claim via Facebook.
Or, to put it another way, Oakland’s KTVU Fox 2 and its anchor, the long-time Frank Somerville (who is the father of an African American girl), were blasted by long-time hip hop journalist Davey D Cook, but only by way of his Facebook profile page, and sadly not by video, but only by text.
Since such a social media entry doesn’t travel far around the Internet (and because Facebook is not designed to produce automatically search engine optimized posts from profile pages) and Davey D is a friend both on Facebook and in real life, and the post was public and embedable, this Oakland blogger / vlogger took the liberty of giving it the proper search boost. Here’s the post text, followed by the embeded version.
It would be helpful to all if Frank Somerville at KTVU used his platform (or if Fox allowed him to use it) to share his thoughts on this. Also, how does he talk to his daughter about white supremacy? Considering Frank opened up about his own racial bias in 2016, it seems like now is a good time for a follow-up.
Here’s Davey D…
Dear KTVU Fox 2 and Frank Somerville KTVU
Just saw your evening coverage of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. You showed the Mayor of Dayton and had political analyst Brian Sobel to discuss the tragedies…
It was disappointing to hear you all do a segment in which you made these horrific shootings be reduced to debates around gun control. There was no mention of the rise of white supremacy and white nationalism and how it was clearly embraced by at least one of the shooters… How and why did you do this? Who made that call to omit this ??
During the discussion, co-anchor Alyanna Gomez mentioned white supremacy one time and it wasn’t even acknowledged. One would think that racial hatred for Brown and Black folks had nothing to do with any of these killings. Even when you guys did a segment on the FBI opening a domestic terrorism case for the mass shooting in Gilroy, there was no mention of white nationalism or white supremacy…Again it was clear the shooter had embraced this hateful ideology. Y’all talked about domestic terrorism and no mention of race… The words y’all used to describe the shooter was that he was pursuing ‘violent ideologies’ … How??
In your coverage, there was no Brown or Black leaders shown speaking during your 10/11 o’clock broadcast about the impact of white nationalism… All we saw was people talking about gun control and mental health…Even in your mentions about anticipated protests directed at the president scheduled visits to El Paso and Dayton would be around gun control and not his inciteful rhetoric.
A year or so from now when someone does research on these mass shootings and look at your archived news coverage it will see this story about gun control sans racial strife..There would be no mention that most of the people killed in Dayton were Black and that most of the people killed in El Paso were Brown…That’s inexcusable and irresponsible
At this point, one can only conclude that these glaring omissions were intentional…The question is why? Frank, you have not been shy about speaking out, why was this not a front and center topic in the coverage?? You and your guests talked about political leaders coming together to enact meaningful gun control legislation, but not a mention of elected officials coming together to eradicate hateful rhetoric which led to these young white men doing these mass shootings..Again, who made the call at KTVU to not have the scourge of white nationalism mentioned in your coverage this evening?
Embded version:
Stay tuned.