[LibertyRocks]

NEWS ARTICLE EDITED @ CFRA RE: REPORT OF 5 INJURED

I was able to find the article on the CFRA website earlier this afternoon. Following is the copied and pasted text of the article as it appeared at 4:18pm today:

Blast Rocks University of Oklahoma Campus, 1 Killed
http://www.cfra.com/headlines/index.asp?cat=2&nid=32534
Darren McEwen
Sunday, October 02, 2005 12:50 AM
One person is dead and five others are injured following an explosion on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.
The blast occurred not far from a football stadium that was packed with fans cheering on the Oklahoma Sooners. Spectators reported hearing the blast during the game but no one was hurt in the stadium.
There are reports that the blast was part of a suicide plot. The victim's name has not been released and the cause of the explosion is unknown.

At 4:31 pm I sent the following email to Steve Winogron the news director at CFRA:

Dear Mr. Winogron,

In your coverage of the OU suicide (article by Darren McEwen - http://www.cfra.com/headlines/index.asp?cat=2&nid=32534 ) it is stated that 5 people were injured. I was curious if you knew where information about the injuries originated from, and if you are confident with this report. All other coverage available at this time (mostly through the AP) reports no injuries sustained except the victim of the apparent suicide.

This is just out of curiousity - I am a member of a large online forum and we've been following this closely, brainstorming and speculating on this as one of our members has several children at the school, and was at the stadium when this occurred. This one piece of information regarding injuries sticks out to us at this point as being "odd".

Thank you for your time and assistance in this matter it is greatly appreciated.

Most Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

At approx. 6:30pm this evening I rechecked the article and the words "and five others are injured" have been removed from the article. I have not received word back from the station (I'm not expecting to and will frankly be shocked if I do).

Thought this was an interesting development. Seeing as this was not an AP article I would tend to think the reporting was more reliable than the MSM stuff we see all over but I am not familiar with the station or the reporter.

The question now is - were there 5 injured - my guess is probably. Why are they failing to report this? My guesses are as follows: A.) They are afraid witnesses could be in danger B.) They don't want ANYONE talking to them - at least not at this point C.) There is a small chance that there was no-one else injured in the first place, but considering a bus driver was knocked off his feet and most likely sustained at least MINOR injuries I would say that "no-one injured" is NOT an accurate statement.

[Cindy]

Thank you LibertyRocks and thanks for following up on it and documenting it here.

Good job.

[pops88]

One of the posts here said the bus driver was taken to the hospital. That would be at least injured, and there was the student reported to have the red face from being so close to the blast. Interesting the article was changed after being released.

[Rte66]

My additional thanks to for following up on the "injuries" story.

FWIW, I *think* the reporter, McEwen, is primarily a sports writer. I remember googling his name really quickly the other night when I had the article but couldn't place the KFRA580 talk radio station (in Ottawa, Canada) as his affiliation. Most of the first few hits were sports-related items.

[Eastbound]

Here's a link showing feedback by locals on the story:

OUDaily

[fanfan]

. Seeing as this was not an AP article I would tend to think the reporting was more reliable than the MSM stuff we see all over but I am not familiar with the station or the reporter.

CFRA is our only local talk radio station.

It is owned by CHUM, and is also affiliated with CNN for 'breaking world news'.

As far as I'm concerned, they are MSM, although they seem not to think so.

This report would have been written on the weekend, while Winogron was off, and he probably hadn't looked at the article until he received your e mail.

Darren McEwen is one of their local reporters, and IIRC, was reporting about the disappearance, and discovery of 18 year old Jennifer Teague, who was found dead a little over 2 weeks ago.

It does seem strange that this report had his by-line, instead of AP, or CNN. Where did he get his information?

[LibertyRocks]

UPDATE regarding info in post #3750

NEWS ARTICLE EDITED @ CFRA RE: REPORT OF 5 INJURED

I just got an email back from Steve Winogron the news editor at CFRA. He states original information was gathered by his "overnighter" from usaradio.com. He stated it is usual policy to source this information and in this case due to shift changes it was overlooked. I have no reason to believe from his email that he is trying to cover anything up - seems to be a nice guy as far as I can tell. (o:

I am unable to find any coverage on usaradio.com of this event. I have googled hoping for a cache page, but it seems it's not indexed, and there are no results for this source in Google NEWS. I will post more information about this later, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew I got a reply which I didn't expect! (o:

I will be writing up a rather large summary with links and such later tonight so that those coming in late can catch up quickly...