After a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the city’s prosecuting attorney gave a statement and condemned one group of people in particular for obstacles in his investigation: the news media.
It was the media, Robert McCulloch said, that made his job investigating a racially charged controversy most difficult.
“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something — for anything — to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media,” he said during his statement Monday.
McCulloch went on to somewhat empathize with the media and public, who he said simply wanted more information on sensitive details around the case. “Yet those closely guarded details, especially about the phyiscal evidence, give law enforcement a yard stick for measuring the truthfulness of witnesses,” he said.
Did the news media, in fact, end up committing a disservice by descending upon Ferguson in droves to cover every facet of the situation? As with everything else stemming from the Aug. 9 shooting, the answer is complicated. But media critics interviewed by the Washington Examiner say, for the most part, no.
David Zurawik, media critic for the Baltimore Sun, says McCulloch’s frustration is entirely out of order. “Officials like him would rather operate without any press scrutiny,” Zurawik told the Examiner. “There have been all kinds of excesses in the press [covering Ferguson] and there has been a lot of hotdogging by the reporters, but there has also been some really good journalism.”
Almost immediately after the shooting, reports surfaced about violence and looting by some protesters and possible overreaction by police attempting to keep the city from erupting into chaos. Some reporters were briefly detained by police for failing to clear areas supposedly deemed unsafe, most memorably the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly. Other reporters faced serious danger, as when rocks were thrown at MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN’s Sara Snider (one hit her in the head during a live shot Monday after the non-indictment was announced).
“People risked something standing out in those streets,” Zurawik said. “Maybe it wasn’t Gaza but it took something to stand out there and report.”
It’s true, though, that during the grand jury’s months-long deliberation, baseless speculation and hearsay fed much of the 24-hour news cycle when there were no real developments. No surer example can be found than in CNN’s Don Lemon.
Nearly two weeks after the shooting, Lemon said on CNN that a member of the U.S. National Guard present in Ferguson had referred to protesters by the n-word. Lemon hadn’t heard it himself or seen it on camera. Only one of his producers told him it happened. He reported it on national television anyway.
Dan Gainor, vice president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the news media sensationalized Ferguson to negative effect. “The major media hyped the potential for Ferguson violence like they were promoting Monday night football,” Gainor said.
At the liberal Media Matters, Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert said no matter the media’s role in Ferguson, it shouldn’t have bothered McCulloch. “McCulloch’s correct that the cycle’s appetite can be insatiable, but he oversaw a grand jury investigation that met in secrecy over three months,” he said. “It’s not like McCulloch had to battle the news cycle, or what he considered to be unfair coverage, during an open trial. His complaint seems like a weak one to me.”
Though McCulloch insisted in his statement that the grand jury carefully weighed all the evidence presented to it before reaching a decision, Towson University communications professor Richard Vatz said that by publicly criticizing the media’s Ferguson coverage, McCulloch may have caused concern that the investigation wasn’t free of outside influences.
“Ideally, the investigation should be conducted in a completely disinterested manner, which means that no one should be affected by pressures outside of the legal process,” Vatz said. “To imply that the news cycle’s ‘insatiable appetite for something’ may have been distractingly on the minds of the duly enfranchised authorities as they did their jobs makes the law appear to be anything but blind.”
As anyone knows, it can be hugely distracting to do work when it feels like someone is watching and evaluating, particularly when the person doing the watching and evaluating isn’t held in high regard (public trust in the news media remains at a low). In that regard, Syracuse University TV and pop culture professor Robert Thompson can sympathize. But he says it’s something McCulloch should have been able to get over.
“That’s just something the whole process has to deal with,” Thompson said. “Justice has to try to make its way through its processes in the face of all these new technologies. To blame the media is something of course we do about everything.”
He added that he has seen the media behave irresponsibly at times and that the news cycle does require an unnervingly constant stream of content. “Is that necessarily a bad thing? No.”
