The Associated Press has been in Ferguson covering the anniversary of Michael Brown's death and the George Soros-funded out-of-towners leading the "festivities."
I'll leave it to others to dissect the wire service's on-the-street reporting during the past several days. What also concerns me is how AP's reports continue to bitterly cling to half-truths and distortions about how Brown died and the nature of the evidence evaluated by the grand jury which refused to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in his death. Five paragraphs containing such distortions were included in at least three different AP reports this weekend.
The reports I located are the following:
- August 9, 12:54 PM CT — "CROWDS MARCH IN FERGUSON TO MARK ANNIVERSARY OF MICHAEL BROWN DEATH"
- August 10, 1:00 a.m. PT — "Shots fired at protest marking anniversary of Brown's death"
- August 10. 4:30 a.m. — "Minutes of silence mark Brown anniversary in Ferguson"
Five paragraphs of text all three reports have in common read as follows (HT Gary Hall; bolds and numbered tags are mine):
But the focus of the weekend has largely been on Brown, who graduated from high school weeks before the shooting and planned to go to trade school to study to become a heating and air conditioning technician.
Relatives and friends described Brown as a quiet, gentle giant [1] who stood around 6-foot-3, weighed nearly 300 pounds and was eager to start technical college. But police said Brown stole items from a convenience store and shoved the owner who tried to stop him [2] on the morning of Aug. 9, 2014. Moments later, he and a friend were walking on Canfield Drive when Wilson, who is white, told them to move to the sidewalk.
That led to a confrontation inside Wilson's police car. It spilled outside, and Wilson claimed that Brown came at him, menacingly, leading to the fatal shooting. Some witnesses claimed Brown had his hands up in surrender. [3] Federal officials concluded there was no evidence to disprove testimony by Wilson [4] that he feared for his safety, nor was there reliable evidence that Brown had his hands up in surrender [3] when he was shot.
The shooting led to protests, some violent, and the unrest escalated again in November when a St. Louis County grand jury determined that Wilson did nothing wrong. He resigned days later. The November riots included fires that burned more than a dozen businesses.
The Justice Department reached the same conclusion in March, clearing Wilson. But in a separate report, the Justice Department cited racial bias and profiling in policing [5] as well as a profit-driven municipal court system that often targeted black residents, who make up about two-thirds of Ferguson's populace.
Notes:
[1] — We've been hearing this for over a year, with very little concrete or anecdotal evidence that this giant was "gentle."
[2] — This isn't a "police said" matter. It's on videotape. The AP is only using "police said" to sow doubt where there is none.
[3] (used twice) — The witnesses who said Brown had his hands up were obviously lying; prosecutors let them appear before the grand jury anyway, likely fearing backlash if the liars did get their chance to be heard. Based on the AP's and others' insistence that there's a chance they were telling the truth, it appears that going after these liars for perjury might have been a wise move.
[4] — What a lovely use of a negative. They couldn't "disprove" Wilson's testimony. Horse manure. The physical evidence, i.e., things he couldn't have fabricated, was all in his favor. Wilson was telling the truth, so the grand jury didn't indict him.
[5] — The Justice Department, having stretched itself politically by injecting itself into Ferguson, had to make it look like they were "doing something" after the grand jury refused to indict Wilson. Of course they couldn't bring any kind of valid charges against, not even more nebulous ones involving violations of civil rights, so they instead whined officers applying logic and experience to their decisions relating to who might be considered suspicious. What rubbish.
Two of the three AP reports cited here also contain the following paragraph, which in both instances appeared well before the five paragraphs I have reviewed appeared:
Some people who marched in the Saturday parade wore T-shirts with likenesses of Brown or messages such as "Please stop killing us" or "Hands up! Don't shoot!" which became a rallying cry during the sometimes-violent protests that followed the shooting a year ago.
Such a paragraph would lead readers to believe that there is some validity to the "Hands Up! Don't shoot!" mantra in Michael Brown's death.
There isn't.
This is how propaganda gets done, and why urban legends refuse to die.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
