A Ferguson Story on ‘Conflicting Accounts’ Seems to Say ‘Trust Us’
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2 ... -trust-us/
Want an object lesson in the problems of dubious equivalency and anonymous sources?
Look no further than Wednesday’s Times, where a highly fraught question — precisely how, in Ferguson, Mo., a black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot by a white police officer, Darren Wilson — is the subject of the lead story.
The story’s first paragraph says that “witnesses have given investigators sharply conflicting accounts of the killing.”
But where is the backup for the “he said she said” that readers are so tired of? What’s the sourcing?
It comes in the fifth paragraph — the basis for much of the story and one that’s so hard to grasp that I had to read it twice to understand what it was saying.
It goes like this:
“The accounts of what witnesses have told local and federal law enforcement authorities come from some of those witnesses themselves, law enforcement authorities and others in Ferguson.”
Once you’ve absorbed that — the basis of the “sharply conflicting accounts” — you might ask: “And from whom, exactly, has The Times learned of these accounts?” Here’s the answer, which immediately followed in the article:
“Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.”
The implicit answer is “trust us.”
The story goes on to quote, by name, two eyewitnesses who say that Mr. Brown had his hands up as he was fired on. As for those who posit that Mr. Brown was advancing on the officer who was afraid the teenager was going to attack him,
the primary source on this seems to be what Officer Wilson told his colleagues on the police force. The Times follows this with an unattributed statement: “Some witnesses have backed up that account.” But we never learn any more than that.
A number of readers have written to me about all of this, some prompted by a long, highly critical piece by the media commentator Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC that aired on Wednesday.
Arthur Silen of Davis, Calif., was one of those who wrote to me. He detailed a list of complaints, referring to what he called clear lapses of professionalism and integrity, and told me that he “expected much, much better” of The Times. And Maggie Rheinstein of McLean, Va. described herself as “distraught and upset” by the reporting standards in the story, which she described as “stenography for the police department.”
James Dao, a deputy national editor, disagreed with my assessment and what I told him of the readers’ concerns. He said that, while it would be ideal in every story to name all the sources, that was not possible here.
“In stories of this type, it’s rare and difficult to get on-the-record what investigators are learning,” he told me by phone on Thursday. But Times reporters and editors strongly believe that their sources are credible, and that it was important to include their perspective, even if presented anonymously.
He also told me that while there is disagreement on some of what happened, there is also considerable agreement — that a scuffle occurred, and that Mr. Brown ran away. “It’s at that point that it gets muddy,” Mr. Dao said. “The story says ‘this is messy.’” The reporting “gives some insight into how law enforcement is viewing this case — this is what they say they’ve got.” That, he said, is valuable to the reader.
As for the vagueness of the sourcing — readers don’t even know which law enforcement agency, much less the source’s name — it reflects “how we worked it out with various sources,” he said; no further specificity was possible. The story is both “fair and balanced,” he said, and the balance is legitimate. “I don’t think there’s a false balance here at all.”
My take is this: I’ll grant that the Ferguson story is a difficult one to report, with dangerous conditions for reporters and photographers, relentless deadlines and shifting story lines. The Times has generally covered it accurately and well, from all that I can see.
But this article doesn’t measure up, for the reasons detailed above. The Times is asking readers to trust its sourcing, without nearly enough specificity or detail; and it sets up an apparently equal dichotomy between named eyewitnesses on one hand and ghosts on the other.