2/21/2014 Shame on Seattle’s KING5 News for their bias

King 5 News in Seattle ran a piece today on the town of Aberdeen’s “Kurt Cobain Day.” (thanks Kelly O’Neil for pointing the clip out). Anchor Dennis Bounds began the story with this line: “Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, was a well-known heroin addict who shot himself nearly twenty years ago.” The reporter goes on to outline some of Kurt’s many problems in Aberdeen (and implies that being arrested in Aberdeen for graffiti made Kurt some kind of public enemy No. 1). The reporter, Drew Mikkelsen, also says that Kurt “was no George Washington.”

He wasn’t, and whoever wrote this piece for TV news is no Edward R. Murrow. Kurt’s entire accomplishments are reduced to the fact that he was a “well-known” drug user. This is 2014. This is Seattle. People around here, even those on TV news, are not this hateful, stupid, or biased.

This is the lamest piece piece of Seattle television news reporting on music since Lou Guzzo (RIP) editorialized against punk rock. Shame on you KING 5, shame on you Dennis Bounds for reading the introduction, and shame on Drew Mikkelsen for the unbelievably-biased report, which could have had all the same facts spun without scandal overwhelming all else. Shameful. Embarrassing. Not the same KING 5 that used to pride itself on quality reporting (and local programming like Almost Live). UPDATE: King 5 removed the video of their report from YouTube and other social media sites. The anchor has privately apologized but no official apology has yet been issued on air. Cowards.