Did the media get Ferguson wrong?

What we thought we knew about Ferguson is very likely not what actually happened

Ferguson
(Image credit: (Scott Olson/Getty Images))

In August, after a Ferguson, Missouri police officer shot and killed a young, unarmed black man named Michael Brown, the reaction by local residents, civil rights activists, and the media instantly went nuclear. The DNA of our political and legal systems rest on principles of equality and color-blindness, and here was yet another example of a major genetic mutation that we've been unable to fix: young black men being murdered by the police because they're young and black. Still. Even in 2014, this happened, at a time when adults are supposed to be racially enlightened.

Ferguson checked several boxes. The town was mostly black and its police department was mostly white. The basic story was black and white, too. Eyewitnesses saw officer Darren Wilson shoot his weapon, over and over, at Brown. They saw him shoot Brown in the back. They saw him shoot Brown after Brown had stumbled from the shock of the first thwack, thwack, thwack, bullets having shattered his arm.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.