Let's Not Lose Sight Of The Real Problems At Mizzou

There was no shortage of media on campus when University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe announced his resignation on Monday.

Nor was the media completely absent in the days prior to the announcement, when tensions ran high at the university and black members of the school's football team joined protests over how Wolfe and other administrators had handled racist incidents at the school. 

So when students and (at least) one professor began aggressively protesting the media's presence -- as captured in the below video, which shows a mob of demonstrators harassing a young journalist -- it caught a lot of people by surprise.

It's a cringe-worthy video, particularly considering it was filmed at a school known for its prestigious journalism program. It's doubly concerning that the woman in the video has been identified as Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media at the university who, days earlier, put out a public call on Facebook asking for more media coverage of the protests.

The media responded to the affront, as it so often does, with a flood of coverage. But amid all the anger and a flurry of calls for Click's resignation -- who stepped down from her appointment at the journalism school late Tuesday but is still a professor in the university's Department of Communications -- let's not forget what inspired all of this to begin with.

"Racism needs to be the main issue here, but that's not my prerogative," Mark Schierbecker, the student journalist who filmed the altercation, wrote Wednesday morning on Twitter. "Fighting racism vs advocating freedom of press is a false dichotomy."

 

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