The story of Ferguson, MO, roils on. On Tuesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published Michael Brown’s leaked autopsy report, and The New York Times and Washington Post featured unnamed sources implying that a grand jury may accept police officer Darren Wilson’s account of the confrontation which left Brown dead. Fresh protests of over 200 people followed outside the Ferguson Police Department, as well as reports that Attorney General Eric Holder is “exasperated” at the “selective flow of information.”
Antonio French, an alderman in St. Louis who reported much of the protests on Vine and Twitter, called into question the media’s role in publishing those leaks at a public talk at Columbia Journalism School Thursday evening. Wesley Lowery, reporter for The Washington Post, Alice Speri, reporter for Vice News, and Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, also participated in the event.
“In this news world, this environment we live in, most news organizations won’t turn down a leak,” French said. “But I think what people were most upset by was some of the reporting was almost editorializing, saying that this [autopsy] substantiates the version of events from police.”
Most unnamed sources in the Times and Post have supported Wilson’s account of events. Leaking information from a grand jury is a criminal act, which has also undermined faith in the legal system, said French. He noted that this plays right into a narrative that many African-American residents of Ferguson have held—that the justice system is stacked against them.
Over two months after 18-year-old Brown was shot by Wilson, sparking mass protests and international media attention, a grand jury decision over whether to indict Wilson may appear in the next month. The Department of Justice, commenting on the leaks on Tuesday, said: “There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.”
Lowery, who covered the riots for the Post, said: “I think that it’s a reasonable question for anyone to ask a media outlet if it’s responsible to publish a leak from law enforcement about a case in which law enforcement is investigating a shooting by a member of law enforcement of a member of the public.”
During the talk, Lowery discussed his arrest while reporting in Ferguson, and said police gave little protection to the media. “In my experience on the ground, the police never made any distinction at all between media, between peaceful protestor, between community member walking down the street, and kid throwing a rock,” he said. “There’s never been any differentiation in terms of who is being arrested or who is being tear gassed or who is being hit with rubber bullets.”
Lowery’s arrest—together with the tear-gassing of an Al Jazeera crew and the arrest of Antonio French—contributed to a storyline in Ferguson of poor police treatment of people who were not protesting. Ultimately that was only one of the many stories that Ferguson sparked, including the militarization of police, racial inequality, and the relations between a mostly white police force and a mostly black community.
In the wake of the leaks, another storyline is unfolding.
“The remaining story is, ‘Can a black man in the United States get justice in the legal system,’” said Lowery. “These leaks, if anything, give [residents of Ferguson] the inclination that no, you cannot.”
Chris Ip is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisiptw.
