A #Ferguson Story on ‘Conflicting Accounts’ Seems to Say ‘Trust Us’ - NYTimes.com
▻http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/publiceditor/2014/08/21/a-ferguson-story-on-conflicting-accounts-seems-to-say-trust-us
Pour le New York Times et comme d’habitude les témoignages anonymes ont le même poids que ceux qui ne le sont pas du moment que les premiers sont en faveur de la partie dominante.
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.
