Opinion : How media mediocrity (or malfeasance?) helped fan the flames of Ferguson

I was sitting with about a dozen local residents a while ago, when someone asked us to tell what local news station we prefer.

Most mentioned the local ABC or NBC affiliates, and a couple confessed to preferring CBS’ local station.

Not me. I briefly thought about going along and saying ‘7’ or ‘9,’ but I didn’t.

In a moment of candor, I confessed something in my profession probably shouldn’t say.

“I hardly ever watch TV news,” I said.

Almost never.

Almost every time I watch the TV news, I end up yelling at the screen more violently than a frustrated football fan.

It sounds something like this: “What?” “This is news?” "Seriously?"

My complaints are not that I disagree with any particular statement, but that what I am hearing does not represent something that I would find worthy of writing on Vinton Today.

One example:

“Stay tuned for a great way to save money on your electricity” said one national TV anchor. I waited. “Use florescent bulbs” was the message. I have been using them for a decade.

Hey, did you know that in Dubuque, before a major snow storm, people flock to grocery stores?

Well, duh. People do that in every town before every storm. But our Waterloo- and Cedar Rapids-based stations are trying to earn advertising money in Dubuque by mentioning that city as much as possible, whether or not the news is newsworthy.

And I once researched a report from ABC news about a “shortage” of a leukemia drug for children. “Thousands of kids could die,” said their medical expert. I researched that shortage. In less than an hour I learned that this “shortage” was going to last for a couple of weeks, and that it was just a mere distribution problem. Not only did nobody die, but nobody even missed a treatment.

This column, however, is about Ferguson, Mo.

There are way too many factors in the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson story to comprehensively cover in one column. Yeah, some police officers have done unimaginable things to members of minority races. Yeah, crime rates among young black men are way too high. Yeah, there seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the number of unarmed black children who die from gun violence -- often at the hands of armed black teens or young men.

These things are, or have been, factors in areas like Ferguson.

Another major factor, however, is how the media has handled the case.

In his summary of the testimony the grand jury heard in the Wilson case, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said that some witnesses stood by their statements, even after being told that the evidence in the Ferguson case completely contradicts what they say they saw.

Question: How many of those witnesses were quoted in the media, who didn't bother pointing out the contradictions?

Answer: Way too many.

Instead of challenging the inflammatory and untrue witness statements, too many in the media simply repeated them. Those reports helped fuel the fire in Ferguson.

Sure, the Ferguson PD could have handled things better, communicated more clearly, and responded more wisely to the protests in those early days.

But countless media reports included statements from witnesses saying things about the incident that were blatantly untrue. Those untruths, repeated by newspaper writers and TV personalities with very little scrutiny, colored the debate and made it look to many that a white police officer shot an unarmed black teen who was either running or way or facing the officer with his hands up in surrender.

Many people still believe that today, even after media reports that one of the first witnesses has a record of lying to police.

That is just one example of the media mediocrity – or malfeasance – that has littered the streets of Ferguson since that horrible August day.

I saw that exasperating mediocrity clearly again Monday night, as McCulloch announced the grand jury’s decision to not indict Wilson.

I arrived home from the school board meeting just after the press conference began. McCulloch gave some background, defined the process, and then said that the jurors had agreed to not indict the officer.

He was in the middle of explaining the evidence when all of the sudden, his voice was replaced with that of George Stephanopoulos. It was more important to ABC news (CBS did the same a few seconds later) to blab about the meaning of the grand jury ruling, before allowing the prosecutor another 10 minutes to finish summarizing the facts of the investigation.

Silly me. I thought the job of the journalist was to present as much factual information as possible.

Nope. The job, apparently among TV news people, is go on air and talk like they know what’s going on, without first bothering to find out first.

It took me an hour to find a media outlet that actually allowed McCulloch to finish his press conference (found here) and take questions, without interrupting us with some pundit who had much less knowledge of the case.

George Stephanopoulus was too busy talking to hear McCulloch point out that the witnesses stuck to their story, even after learning about evidence that contradicts what they said they saw.

Now, George, according to those who study American media, is trying to be the first news anchor to interview Officer Wilson. I hope, if this happens, that George (and the rest of the media), try to focus on learning Wilson's story before talking about it.

In this age when TV personalities are elbowing each other and the Internet in order to be “first” with a story, it seems that most of them have stopped trying to be the best and bringing us the whole story, regardless of what the story is.

That quest makes the media part of the problem, especially in situations like this one, where being thoroughly factual has to come before being first.

Something else even more troubling took place Monday night in Ferguson, in the form of a question from the reporter's galley.

"Why aren't there any laws protecting Michael Brown?" asked one man.

What McCulloch should have said was, "The fact that we are here, after spending several months in long and thorough discussions, probes, interviews and interrogations involving countless law enforcement personnel makes it clear that there are countless laws protecting Michael Brown."

There are, to say the obvious, countless laws protecting Michael Brown and the rest of us. To ignore the obvious and ask a question like that is not journalism -- it's sensationalism.

That question, which includes both an obvious untruth and a demand for an explanation for why that untruth is true, represents one part of the malfeasance that many in the media have had since the shooting of Brown. Instead of trying to find out what happened, too many people wearing the title of Journalist instead injected their opinions and deliberately said things designed to attract attention to themselves and to declare as facts things that are clearly untrue. The result of that, intentionally or not, encourages violent responses like the one we witnessed Monday night after the announcement of the grand jury's decision.

During the New York City draft riots of the Civil War, editor Horace Greeley wrote that the words of other newspaper editors were "the torch that lit the flame" that caused those riots.

Yeah, words from the media can still do that. And, it seems, some of those words are having that effect in Ferguson now.