Each week on Sound Effect we invite a panel a journalists to talk about local stories they feel didn't get sufficient attention.
Joining host Gabriel Spitzer on this week’s show were journalists Nina Shapiro, Mike Lewis and Sarah Stuteville share their take on some of the under-reported stories of the week.
Nina Shapiro said that gun violence is on the rise in Seattle and the issue needs more attention. Police are reporting 30 percent more gunshots than the prior year, she said.
“Every week, practically, we’re hearing about somebody else who has been fatally shot – sometimes several people who have been fatally shot,” she said. “And we hear about them and we know the barest details of what happened but we often don’t know more than that.”
Shapiro said no one is assessing the cumulative impact of the shootings on the communities where they happened. “I talk to people who feel like they are in a constant state of mourning,” she said.
And most of the victims? Young Black men.
“There’s a sense that they don’t know who is going to be next,” she said.
Stuteville said the FBI’s stepped-up community “outreach” is surprising to her. A Globalist reporter who been working on stories about the Black Lives Matter movement. Then one day recently the reporter found himself as the focus of FBI questions.
“His house had received a surprise visit from a couple of FBI agents who then followed up with a phone call because he wasn’t home at the time,” Stuteville said. They wanted to know about reporting he did on Black Lives Matter.
In particular, the agents were interested in stories he did on women in the movement. They wanted ask him some questions about the coverage. He felt intimidated by the federal agency and called the Globalist editor. He then arranged for a pro bono attorney who advised the reporter to not talk to the FBI without an attorney present.
“It got me wondering about a couple of things,” she said. “One, about how common this was specifically this particular community.”
She contacted the FBI to find out if questioning a reporter was standard practice. “Their line to me was (that) this was an attempt at community outreach.
“It turns out they are pretty common in Muslim communities here in Seattle and in our region,” she said. “I was naïve to be surprised by that, I guess.”
Lewis said changes to Bumbershoot were not necessarily lacking coverage but maybe the coverage was misplaced.
After financial problems last year, the three-day festival was recently bankrolled and financed by entertainment giant, AEG which made changes – such as eliminating KEXP’s popular music lounge event.
The changes speak to a larger issue with the Bumbershoot itself, he said. Maybe the event has become too dependent on big money. Maybe it should have been allowed to collapse, he said, so something new could grow in its place.
