WATCH: Pumpkin Fest Organizer Threatens To ‘Pull The Plug’ On Local Reporter

The coordinator of Keene, N.H.'s annual Pumpkin Festival threatened to "pull the plug" on a reporter who confronted her about the college students who were partying and rioting violently outside the festivities.
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In a bizarre scene reminiscent of Leslie Knope, the well-meaning but bumbling suburban bureaucrat on “Parks and Recreation,” the coordinator of Keene, N.H.’s annual Pumpkin Festival lost her cool in front of a reporter Saturday night as college students partied and rioted violently outside the festivities.

Ruth Sterling tried to grab a microphone from public access reporter Jared Goodell as he complained that she was preventing him from doing his job.

“Right now Ruth Sterling, who is the festival coordinator, is on site here, and is being — well, she’s not letting me do my job and report to you,” Goodell said “She would not like me to tell you what is going on at Keene State College.”

“Okay, are you a free-stater or something?” Sterling asked, referring to a libertarian activist group with strong ties to Keene.

She then insisted that the footprint of the festival was “100 percent safe” from the rioters and said she didn’t want the families attending the festival to be disturbed by the chaos offsite.

“So if you think that inciting these people is a good idea, I am going to pull the plug on you,” Sterling said to Goodell. “ Because you are a guest of the Keene Pumpkin Festival and I assigned you this spot. Do not alarm our guests.”

“When you report the news, when you report the reality, the people in charge want to shut you down,” Goodell said as Sterling again tried to grab his microphone.

“This is a licensed, private event put on by a nonprofit agency, and you have no right to self-promote here, darling,” Sterling said with a tight smile.

Goodell told TPM on Monday that he spent $5,000 of his own money to cover the Pumpkin Festival for public access channel Cheshire TV. He said that coverage of the riots took up relatively little of his broadcast.

“I would say that we undercovered the riots, because out of the eight hours that we broadcast I would guess that we maybe talked about the riots for 20 minutes,” he said in a phone interview.

Goodell explained that while the riots didn’t spill into the festival area, families could have encountered the rioters while walking to their cars in parking lots outside the festival footprint.

“The festival was family-friendly, but there were dangers on the outside,” he said. “Because we’re playing to people at home on TV, people who live in those neighborhoods have a right to know that there’s dangers happening in their neighborhood. They have a right to be informed and we were the only media outlet live at that time who could give them that information.”

Watch below:

This post has been updated.

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