Meribah Knight
WPLN’s Peabody Award-winning podcast host has launched another series based on an investigation that was named as a Pulitzer finalist.
This week, the Nashville NPR affiliate’s senior reporter and producer, Meribah Knight, kicked off The Kids of Rutherford County. The four-part series expands on an investigation from WPLN and ProPublica about more than a decade of arrests and illegal jailing of Black children in Middle Tennessee’s Rutherford County. The show’s first two episodes dropped on Oct. 26 via The New York Times and Serial Productions in partnership with the public radio station and ProPublica. Just under 30 minutes each, the first two episodes are bingeable for a commuter drive into Nashville during rush hour.
In the first episode, listeners are introduced to “The Egregious Video” of what’s described as a pretty typical fight for kids. Knight’s reporting describes how in 2016, after police obtained the video, 11 children were arrested for a charge that actually didn’t exist. Knight includes interviews from a mother of one of those children as well as the child herself, now seven years older.
“For the kids of Rutherford County, getting sent to juvenile detention was almost a rite of passage, a normal part of childhood,” Knight says in Episode 1. “In many cases, what it also was — was illegal.”
The first episode also features audio from internal affairs investigations of police officers after the arrests. Knight takes care to present all sides of the story and notes the striking difference between how people inside the juvenile system see this incident compared to the community on the outside.
Episode 2 begins to delve into that system further, and features a lawyer who was formerly a delinquent himself. He and another lawyer with a similar background teamed up, wanting to do something about the illegality they saw in that system. The first two episodes of the podcast leave the listener with more questions about the juvenile court system.
Knight’s podcast is set to dig further into the Rutherford County court’s rules on confidentiality and privacy and how those permitted an illegal, secretive environment to continue. Will there be any consequences for the adults in this story? Some of the reporting from the original investigation has already had an impact.
Knight’s previous podcast, The Promise, focused on race and inequality in public housing. Her reporting on public education led to shifts in enrollment in one Nashville neighborhood. Her radio and multimedia work has been featured on NPR and The PBS NewsHour. She’s also been featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker.
