My first blog at The Huffington Post! If only didn’t have to come at the heels of such a tragedy. Lawrence King, a 15 year-old who had recently come out to his friends and family was shot by a classmate this February. A few days after the shooting, I had checked Anderson Cooper’s blog and seen that he’d written about King’s murder. He said that the national media had largely neglected King’s death, but that he was going to include a segment on the murder in the “Anderson Cooper 360 Show” that evening. Now, I missed the show on TV, but I since it’s podcasted, I thought I’d be able to find it online. I looked everywhere, but no dice.Click to see my blog post here (bonus: my embarrassingly “serious” headshot). Or, continue reading:

CNN Cuts Gay Teen Killing From Cooper PodcastLast night, Anderson Cooper announced on his 360 blog that Monday night’s show was going to focus on a story that hadn’t received the attention it deserved. He was talking about the murder of Lawrence King, a 15 year-old who was shot in the head by a 14 year-old classmate two weeks ago in California. Shortly before his death, King had come out of the closet and had begun to modify his dress to reflect his sexuality. As a result, he was subjected to homophobic slurs all through his final days.

Cooper is appalled that parents and teachers hadn’t taken this bullying seriously:

According to many accounts he had been bullied repeatedly, and some parents have even claimed students knew of threats to Lawrence’s life… If this had been an African-American student bullied by a teenage skinhead would it have received more attention?

Would school officials have taken it more seriously if it had been a Christian campus leader attacked by another student because of his/her religious beliefs? I don’t have the answers to those questions, but I do think they are worth asking.

Now, I realize that when one cuts an hour-long show down to 24 minutes and 27 seconds, some sacrifices must be made. As a former trainee correspondent at CNN’s Indian Broadcasting Network (CNN IBN) in New Delhi, I am well aware of the effort that goes into making sure that every show is a balance of serious and feel-good stories. But honestly, excluding this murder from your podcast while giving ample room to a kid singing in his underwear (not to mention the never ending banter between Cooper and Erica Hill)? This, after having just blogged about how the story has been ignored by the press? That’s a terrible lapse of judgment.

Here is the 10 minute clip on King that was cut from the official podcast:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Editorial, News, Published, The Huffington Post. You can follow this entry through RSS 2.0 and share it with . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.