When WAFB anchor and investigative reporter Greg Meriwether got an 8:58 a.m. call that somebody had fired upon Baton Rouge police Sunday, he began his mental routine while throwing on clothes and calling sources he had built up over 15 years of working in the market, the Poynter Institute reports.
“I wanted to be careful about whatever language we used,” Meriwether tells the St. Petersburg, Florida-based nonprofit. “We were about to break in on people’s Sunday morning TV programming just as they were going to be waking up or leaving for church.”
Meriwether says he didn’t want to be “over the top.”
“…I kept thinking about how I would break this news to my next-door neighbor,” he tells Poynter. “The only word I could think of was ‘disturbing.’ So initially that is what I said: ‘We have disturbing news.'”
Just how disturbing the news would be unraveled in the nine straight hours Meriwether and co-anchor Lauren Westbrook stayed on the air and live-streamed the coverage online. Meriwether was on the air within a half-hour of getting the call at home. Shortly after he went live, a source close to the situation told him two officers had died.
“We were not ready to let everybody know that,” Meriwether says. “We didn’t know if families had been notified. So I chose to say two officers ‘are in very grave condition.'”
The situation in Baton Rouge was especially sensitive after the funeral of Alton Sterling, who was shot to death by police on July 5 and buried on Friday. After days of tense protests, the funeral didn’t stir new demonstrations, and Sterling’s family pleaded for peace.
But Meriwether purposefully didn’t mention Sterling by name for “at least an hour and a half,” he says.
“It would have been easy to make a connection, this shooting Sunday was within walking distance of some of the most fierce protests,” Meriwether says. “I wanted this to sit on its own, let the facts do the work and let people make whatever connections they wanted to on their own.”
Poynter has the full story.
