It’s smoking-gun simple. KMOV’s Larry Conners lied.
That’s right. Last week on his “Larry Conners, KMOV” Facebook page, Larry Conners, a 28-year veteran news reporter with KMOV, Emmy Award-winning journalist and a political science graduate of West Texas State University, lied.
And even by Facebook standards, this lie was an absurd whopper.
According to Conners, back in April of 2012 he interviewed President Obama. What Conners posted about the interview on Facebook was this: “I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.”
That statement was simply not true, and news reporter Larry Conners knew it was not true at the time he posted on his KMOV Facebook page. As the Post-Dispatch reported shortly afterwards and Conners later admitted, the IRS had been “hammering” on him from 2008 to 2010 – “hammering” to the tune of over $85,000 in unpaid small business/self-employment taxes.
Four days after Conners lied, according to the Post-Dispatch, KMOV removed the anchorman from the air. According to KMOV management, Conners is not fired, not suspended, just “off the air” until further notice. KMOV was “still looking into the situation and weighing our options” – until Wednesday, when the station announced that Conners “was no longer a news reporter.”
I can see why.
For one, KMOV’s news anchorman lied on a sitting president of the United States.
And as if that was not enough, Conners’ lie forever sullied KMOV’s presidential interview “get.” It is no small thing for a news station to snag an interview with a president, and it is also no small thing that the lead anchor used that moment to springboard his lie: “I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me.”
KMOV also seems to have understood that Larry Conners’ Facebook page is not simply a “Larry Conners” Facebook page. The heading for his Facebook page is “Larry Conners, KMOV”. Additionally, his Facebook page is open to everyone, and Conners used it to report on upcoming news stories on KMOV.
It would have been a mistake, however, for KMOV to conclude that this is simply a case of a dishonest/dunderheaded newsman unable to grasp how social media works. No, the motivations behind Conners’ actions appear to be journalistically ruinous.
A complete read of Conners’ KMOV Facebook post and a quick viewing of his 2012 interview with President Obama reveal a clearly right-wing, partisan and paranoid worldview more suited for FOX commentators. Surely viewers tuning into the place where “news never stops” aren’t well served when the anchorman embraces GOP talking points, tea party IRS sentiments and then easily lies on the president of the United States.
I do have to wonder, however: what do you suppose would have happened the longer this lie of anchorman Larry Conners sat deferred in the news studios of KMOV?
It’s simple. We’ve all read enough Langston Hughes to know that it doesn’t dry up like a raisin in the sun … it explodes.
