KCCI did a story about the controversial social media posts shared by Louis Fountain, the individual who the Johnston School District announced would be its director of equity, inclusion and belonging.
The story was based on reporting done here at The Iowa Standard. But it ignored some of Fountain’s most troubling posts.
KCCI did not include anything about a post that said Herschel Walker, a black conservative, didn’t forget he was black, he just doesn’t want to be black. It also failed to include that Fountain “liked” comments in which references were made to “coons.”
Fountain also offered “tips” for people who were going to participate in last summer’s Black Lives Matter riots in Des Moines. One of the tips was that if anyone was planning to go to jail, they needed to be prepared to go to jail.
If you want to see all of the tweets, you can of course check out the full story here.
A Johnston resident messaged The Des Moines Register about the situation.
Reporter Sarah LeBlanc responded and said she had received a statement from the Johnston district and seen several posts in support of Fountain, but was hoping she could talk with someone on the record from the other perspective.
This resident, however, prefers to stay anonymous due to retaliation. The resident wrote to LeBlanc:
“Mr. Fountain posted items on social media that portray him in a way that is at complete odds from what his professional role will be in our community. Mr. Fountain then DELETED these posts – presumably to cover up who he actually is. Has Mr. Fountain been asked to comment?
“The school board or superintendent has not answered whether or not they knew about these posts in advance of announcing the intention to hire Mr. Fountain. Did they know he deleted them? Did they ask him to delete them? Has the Register or anyone reached out to the board for comment?
“The Register has enough to run an objective story without any citizen comments on the record either for or against Mr. Fountain. The question is this: Will the Register live up to the standard it set in the article it ran on the (Carson) King scenario? Is this newsworthy?”
A very worthy question.
The Register defended its decision to rain on the Carson King parade when it published “two racist jokes” King had posted on Twitter in 2012. The tweets — both of them — were seven years old. King was 16.
At the time, King was just a 24-year-old whose sign displayed on College GameDay asking for beer money raised hundreds of dollars. After King announced the money would be donated to Stead Family Children’s Hospital, hundreds of thousands of dollars were collected.
He wasn’t, to my knowledge, taking a job to promote equity, inclusion and belonging in an Iowa school district.
But Fountain is. And while Fountain has certainly done good things in his life, it doesn’t dismiss or discount how horrible these Facebook posts are. Some of them are literally anti-equity, anti-inclusion and anti-belonging.
It doesn’t make sense that the Register thinks it needs to provide some sort of article that includes support for Fountain and opposition to him.
Just report what he said on social media. Just share the facts. No spin, just the facts.
And then let the people decide.
That’s easy to do here at The Iowa Standard because we trust Iowans to make their own decisions based on honest, accurate information.
They just need more places willing to give them honest, accurate information.
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