The public editor of The New York Times has joined a growing number of journalists and pundits who are backing away from key elements of their initial coverage of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.
Margaret Sullivan, the Times' in-house critic and reader liaison, wrote on Monday that she was wrong last year to call out her Times colleagues because they quoted unnamed sources who supported Officer Darren Wilson's account of the fateful Aug. 9 encounter.
"Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I want to acknowledge that I misjudged an important element of that story," Sullivan wrote in her blog.
In the earlier post,
Sullivan ripped an Aug. 20 Times story, "Shooting Accounts Differ As Holder Schedules Visit to Ferguson," as "an object lesson in the problems of dubious equivalency and anonymous sources."
Her charge was that Times reporters and editors wrongly gave equal weight to conflicting accounts of the shooting, despite having named sources for eyewitness claims that Brown had his hands up in attempted surrender, and only "ghosts" — anonymous police sources — who said Brown was advancing on Wilson when he was shot.
The claims of the former became the basis for the "Hands up, Don't Shoot!" rallying cry that was acted out and chanted at protests across the country, and worn on T-shirts as part of a movement that painted Brown as a victim of race-conscious police brutality.
That narrative collapsed, however, with the release this month of a Justice Department report that supported Wilson's account of the struggle and the shooting, and found no forensic evidence to back witness claims that Brown had attempted to surrender.
"Now that the Justice Department has cleared Mr. Wilson in an 86-page report that included the testimony of more than 40 witnesses, it's obvious to me that it was important to get that side of the story into the paper," Sullivan wrote.
The mainstream media re-examinations of Ferguson began in earnest last week, when
liberal columnist Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post admitted that "Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown."
Some liberal outlets continue to defend the assumptions underlying "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!" by arguing that the Brown case was a flawed example of a legitimate concern over bias and aggression in policing.
Sullivan wrote on Monday that she gave "implicit credence" to the named sources casting doubt on Wilson's story, and that the law-enforcement perspective also belonged in the coverage.
Including the latter "wasn't false balance," she wrote, but "an effort to get both sides."