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Tuesday, 26 August 2014 04:01 pmI have other things to write about besides Ferguson, swear to Bob, but I figured I should point out the three hot topics on the pro-police side, and while I'm at it, yammer about the issue of bias and information sources, while it's still fresh in my brain. (Wonkette has a quick and messy on two of these topics, if you want a shorter read that demonstrates bias.) So!
#1. There's a video taken at the scene of Mike Brown's shooting, in which people are talking. Some claim that a man in the background gives a different eyewitness account of what happened, and that he tells his friend Brown came at the officer. What he actually says is "He kept coming at him", and it's not clear to the listener which man is 'he' and which is 'him' - which hasn't stopped right-wing websites from posting transcripts that clearly don't match what's said in the video.
#2: a woman claiming to be a friend of the officer who shot Mike Brown called into a radio show run by Tea Party bigwig Dana Loesch. The woman called herself Josie and claimed that Brown had stopped to taunt the officer, and then 'bum-rushed' him.
CNN is still citing "a friend of Wilson" in stories on Ferguson, despite this Josie being more than unverified - the story she told is one being posted around social media, including a posting that claimed (disproved by a CNN reporter) to be Wilson himself.
Basically, it's a jumped-up email forward being cited as fact without anything to back it up as having come from Wilson at all.
#3: A Post-Dispatch reporter tweeted:
You could argue that she's biased because, as a crime reporter, she frequently works with the police. You could argue that she's a better source than most because, as a crime reporter, she has access to the police and more information that isn't being officially shared. Probably the most accurate thing you could argue, though, is that since she's not working, she's no more or less reliable than anyone else sitting at home with their babies outside Ferguson, watching this unfold on the nightly news and Twitter. Where we were retweeting rumors that police confiscated video and asking if it upheld eyewitness accounts, she was retweeting rumors that witnesses at the scene confirmed the officer's story.
(On that matter, enjoy an excellent argument as to why four eyewitnesses to the shooting trump rumors of ambiguous conversation in the background of a Youtube video. Yes, I'm biased, but I'm biased in favor of witnesses we know about, not rumors of witnesses.)
That's not to say being in Ferguson automatically made one reliable, as all the "No racial divide in Ferguson, says white mayor" jokes demonstrate. People shared their lists of reliable protesters and reporters to follow, and those lists didn't always match up. While many considered St. Louis City alderman Antonio French a very reliable account, others rolled their eyes at white folks latching onto 'respectable' black folks and disregarding sources they themselves considered less swayed by fame and politics, like artist Tef Poe.
The reliability of the media, mainstream or otherwise, was a huge topic of discussion. Folks halfway around the country or the world sneered that people needed to stop relying on CNN and watch the livestream feeds instead. Folks inside the St. Louis area rolled their eyes and pointed out that this was local news here, and we weren't relying on CNN's top of the hour news snippets, but had live footage from local crews on the ground - but at the same time, we were shocked at how long it took local stations to interrupt scheduled programming when there was clearly shit happening that was more important than TMZ, and at the obvious bias of some of the area's elderly white anchors.
And let's face it, not all of the livestreams were created equal. While some got great coverage of events (and this epic educational moment) and showed us the contradiction between the official story and what folks were seeing on the ground, others were just attention-hungry dipshits who might as well have been making the next lame horror shaky-cam snoozefest, and white tech nerds who just had to get in on the story somehow. (Oh, Jack...) For Pete's sake, professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was out there with a livestream.
Ferguson itself seemed split on the issue of the media. Some insisted that the media was portraying only the negative coverage and the negative side of Ferguson, and ignoring the city coming together and trying to heal together, and even making things worse by feeding into the violent protests. Some said the harsh media spotlight was necessary to ensure that something was done to fix the systemic issues the shooting had brought to light, to keep these issues from being swept under the rug, and to keep protesters safe in light of the police response. It became an issue of who gets to speak for a victim, a family, a community, an issue, and who gets to decide when those things are conflated.
And my window of less-distractions has closed, because a storm is rolling in and I'm being nibbled by dogs. You'll have to imagine a tidy closing paragraph, alas.
#1. There's a video taken at the scene of Mike Brown's shooting, in which people are talking. Some claim that a man in the background gives a different eyewitness account of what happened, and that he tells his friend Brown came at the officer. What he actually says is "He kept coming at him", and it's not clear to the listener which man is 'he' and which is 'him' - which hasn't stopped right-wing websites from posting transcripts that clearly don't match what's said in the video.
#2: a woman claiming to be a friend of the officer who shot Mike Brown called into a radio show run by Tea Party bigwig Dana Loesch. The woman called herself Josie and claimed that Brown had stopped to taunt the officer, and then 'bum-rushed' him.
CNN is still citing "a friend of Wilson" in stories on Ferguson, despite this Josie being more than unverified - the story she told is one being posted around social media, including a posting that claimed (disproved by a CNN reporter) to be Wilson himself.
Basically, it's a jumped-up email forward being cited as fact without anything to back it up as having come from Wilson at all.
#3: A Post-Dispatch reporter tweeted:
Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop's version of events in shooting #FergusonThe problem with this, as she realized and The Post-Dispatch clarified: she isn't covering Ferguson, or even working as a reporter right now. She's been on leave since March. And yet her tweet went out with the mantle of media respectability, because her PD credentials are stamped on her account.
Christine Byers (@ChristineDByers) August 19, 2014
You could argue that she's biased because, as a crime reporter, she frequently works with the police. You could argue that she's a better source than most because, as a crime reporter, she has access to the police and more information that isn't being officially shared. Probably the most accurate thing you could argue, though, is that since she's not working, she's no more or less reliable than anyone else sitting at home with their babies outside Ferguson, watching this unfold on the nightly news and Twitter. Where we were retweeting rumors that police confiscated video and asking if it upheld eyewitness accounts, she was retweeting rumors that witnesses at the scene confirmed the officer's story.
(On that matter, enjoy an excellent argument as to why four eyewitnesses to the shooting trump rumors of ambiguous conversation in the background of a Youtube video. Yes, I'm biased, but I'm biased in favor of witnesses we know about, not rumors of witnesses.)
That's not to say being in Ferguson automatically made one reliable, as all the "No racial divide in Ferguson, says white mayor" jokes demonstrate. People shared their lists of reliable protesters and reporters to follow, and those lists didn't always match up. While many considered St. Louis City alderman Antonio French a very reliable account, others rolled their eyes at white folks latching onto 'respectable' black folks and disregarding sources they themselves considered less swayed by fame and politics, like artist Tef Poe.
The reliability of the media, mainstream or otherwise, was a huge topic of discussion. Folks halfway around the country or the world sneered that people needed to stop relying on CNN and watch the livestream feeds instead. Folks inside the St. Louis area rolled their eyes and pointed out that this was local news here, and we weren't relying on CNN's top of the hour news snippets, but had live footage from local crews on the ground - but at the same time, we were shocked at how long it took local stations to interrupt scheduled programming when there was clearly shit happening that was more important than TMZ, and at the obvious bias of some of the area's elderly white anchors.
And let's face it, not all of the livestreams were created equal. While some got great coverage of events (and this epic educational moment) and showed us the contradiction between the official story and what folks were seeing on the ground, others were just attention-hungry dipshits who might as well have been making the next lame horror shaky-cam snoozefest, and white tech nerds who just had to get in on the story somehow. (Oh, Jack...) For Pete's sake, professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was out there with a livestream.
Ferguson itself seemed split on the issue of the media. Some insisted that the media was portraying only the negative coverage and the negative side of Ferguson, and ignoring the city coming together and trying to heal together, and even making things worse by feeding into the violent protests. Some said the harsh media spotlight was necessary to ensure that something was done to fix the systemic issues the shooting had brought to light, to keep these issues from being swept under the rug, and to keep protesters safe in light of the police response. It became an issue of who gets to speak for a victim, a family, a community, an issue, and who gets to decide when those things are conflated.
And my window of less-distractions has closed, because a storm is rolling in and I'm being nibbled by dogs. You'll have to imagine a tidy closing paragraph, alas.