With Ink’s Middle of the Map Fest sprawling across nearly every music venue in Westport the night 22 year-old, Kendrick Williams, was killed, I can see why there was erroneous reporting on the relationship between Williams’ death and the music fest in Westport this past weekend. According to Fox 4, an area rapper was gunned down in Westport on Saturday night. Where I believe erroneous rumors came into play center around the untruth that Williams was performing at Middle of the Map Fest that night. If he was a rapper, that’s fine. But people must understand that his murder did not stem from a prior “concert” or show that he performed at earlier in the night in Westport. With erroneous reporting like this, people will jump to conclusions and say to their friends and family, “Yep. See what happens when you have hip hop in Westport?”
I don’t like the fact that the title of the Fox 4 article reads “Metro Rapper Shot and Killed in Westport”, while the URL for the story reads “http://fox4kc.com/2012/04/08/man-shot-killed-in-westport/”. Fox 4 doesn’t understand that there may very well be 10,000 rappers in this city. Just as an example, if this had been a bass player for some local cover band that no one cares about, would they have noted that he was a musician too? I also find it very strange that there are zero comments on Fox 4′s blog post about the story. Either comments have been disabled so no one can call them out, or they just make their blog posts very tricky to comment on (I just tried but to no avail).
Also, people. You have to understand that just because there are a bunch of racist comments on various local blog posts concerning this story, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the writer who wrote the news piece is a racist themselves. It may just mean that the people who read their blogs are racist themselves.
Sources:
HERE and at the following video:
Chris Mills
Editor-in-Chief at Demencha Magazine LLC and Demencha.com. Send music and event submissions to chris@demencha.com. LOCALS BEFORE LEGENDS.
Will (1 year ago)
Couldn’t agree more.
Sean Malone (1 year ago)
I live across the street and I didn’t even know. Actually, I was probably walking behind Sun Fresh to my house within an hour of when this happened. I remember seeing the police shutting down SW trafficway. I’m confused about what your issue with the reporting in the video is.
Chris Mills (1 year ago)
I thought it was rather self-explanatory.