KCTV knows the little girls understand Lil Wayne

Thanks, KCTV Channel 5, for never letting the facts get in the way of some good, scary hearsay.

After teasing Monday’s 10 p.m. newscast with the onscreen graphic “Overland Park woman raped in parking lot” (that’s a paraphrase, but consider the CSI: Miami audience hooked), Channel 5 opened its broadcast not with that or with coverage of Sen. Claire McCaskill’s health-care town hall that evening. Instead, last night’s lead story was that the Lil Wayne concert already under way at Starlight Theatre had just a little less security than Johnny Cash’s gig at Folsom Prison.

What a relief.

But wait — why the increased protection and limited access to Starlight’s sector of Swope Park?

Channel 5 put expert Matt McDevitt on camera to explain. “There’s quite a few fights outside after,” the Lil Wayne fan told Channel 5, flashing his $125 tickets on his way into the venue. He said last night would be his seventh Lil Wayne gig and that, at previous outings, he’d seen some trouble. “I was right next to a fight — they had knives,” McDevitt said.

Starlight Theatre President Craig T. Nelson Denton Yockey did his part to reassure Channel 5 viewers that all was well.

A quick Nexis search does indeed reveal a couple of Lil Wayne kerfuffles. There were fights reported, including two beer-bottle stabbings that didn’t seriously injure the victims, during a long wait before a Panama City Beach concert in Florida this year. That was back in March. A year before that, fighting among audience members at a Lil Wayne show shut down that gig. In London. London, England.

Back in the United States, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, Times-Tribune, in an otherwise excited review of the same tour that parked here last night, noted that “Lackawanna County Sheriff’s deputies and pavilion security were seen dragging dozens of attendees away throughout the night.” The headline on that story: “Lil Wayne show brings out fans’ best, worst.”

After getting the lowdown from McDevitt, Channel 5’s Jeanene Kiesling turned to a couple of other camera-ready white Lil Wayne fans, father-daughter pair Rick and Kayla Herman. Rick said he’d “thought about that [safety] on the way here.” And as Channel 5’s video package moved from a close-up of Kayla’s face to footage of Lil Wayne grabbing his package onstage, Kiesling narrated, “Kayla Herman had just one thing on her mind, and it had nothing to do with past problems at previous concerts.”

Does anybody watch this stuff before it airs?

And no, pervs and Channel 5 editing crew members, the thing on young Kayla’s mind was the concert itself. “It doesn’t bother me,” she said of the (as KCTV puts it in its online story) “beefed up” security, “because I get to see Lil Wayne.”

Hear that, Kansas City? Channel 5 doesn’t really want you to be afraid of black rappers adored by America’s white, female youth.