When WKMS asked the local health department for Covid-19 case numbers, "including case counts from the university," Jackson somehow learned about it and called a Zoom meeting with the provost and station manager Stan Lampe, who resigned last June.
That was soon after reporter Liam Niemeyer, now at the Kentucky Lantern, sought security video showing District Judge Jamie Jameson "walking around the courthouse in his underwear early in the morning," WPSD reports. Lampe testified before the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission, which removed the judge from office: "I felt as though . . . someone was attempting to influence me or exercise some leverage over me because of the power they hold." WPSD reports, "Lampe said he was subsequently ordered by administrators he believed were acting on Jackson's orders to provide a written explanation."
Lampe, the station's former news director, testified that he was not punished "but the public radio station had received ... changes in their budgetary allocation as you would see lawmakers contact university officials in the event that their — if, if the university official, I can't speak for that person, but I can say the station — not necessarily me, but the station — could receive some negative blowback from the administration."
In November, after Jackson spoke to the Paducah Rotary Club, "WPSD tried to speak with him about the incident involving his and Jameson's conversation and the possible WKMS story. Jackson refused to answer multiple questions before getting into the back seat of a car and being driven away. At the time of this interview, the university had not provided a statement to WPSD. Emails we obtained after the Kentucky attorney general said Murray State violated the law by withholding them reveal that Jackson's opinion about WKMS’s reporting was well known to administrators."
Business Dean David Eaton wrote, "Dr. Jackson gets complaints in regards to the 'investigative' nature of some of the news . . . along the lines of ‘We're not The New York Times.’ And this seems to be the nature of the complaints that are coming to him. … I think this may be tied to a perception of FOIA requests that ‘reporters stir up trouble.’ Or inconvenience. Or maybe shed light in places people don't want it ... which is a legit function of journalism. . . . Clearly, WKMS is not simply a publicity arm of Murray State." Eaton mentioned reporting of a lawsuit against a nonprofit headed by state Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah.
Niemeyer reported, but the station never aired, a story about another legislator's Twitter feed, "which Niemeyer characterized as 'about tweets showing nudity, sex acts and other sexual content that were "liked" by state Sen. Jason Howell's Twitter account'." Howell's district includes Murray. The Lantern ran the story. In pursuing it, Niemeyer told a MSU public-relations excutive that Lampe had "called me at my desk right before we had planned to publish the story and told me to kill it. He told me he couldn't guarantee that my job would be protected if the story ran."
Niemeyer said in the email that News Director Rachel Keller "says the Twitter account story being killed was a part of multiple incidents during her tenure as news director where [she] and/or Lampe faced pressure from university administration or public figures in the community regarding stories that the station published or reporting the station pursued."
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