From the moment journalists first arrived in Ferguson, Mo., to report on the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, criticism for those covering the issue has been constant.
But what was initially restricted mostly to social media and blogs has since spilled over into the mainstream, news pundits and reporters alike now questioning each other’s handling of the unrest in the small Missouri town.
“There’s certainly a lot of valid criticism for the media’s coverage of Ferguson,” the Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “I think everyone can pretty much agree on that. There were certainly a lot of problems with the way that things were covered throughout.”
Media critics, including Fox News’ Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple and CNN’s Brian Stelter, have asked whether the press has made things worse for police and Ferguson residents.
Comedian Chris Rock in a recent interview even critiqued how reporters typically handle racially sensitive events, noting that many journalists fail to dig into the real issues at play.
Reilly’s comments are especially notable given that he has been a federal law enforcement and legal news reporter since 2009. His reporting on Ferguson, which dates back to the first days of unrest in the small Missouri town, has attracted both high marks and sharp criticism.
Reilly and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery briefly gained notoriety in August after being jailed for reportedly not responding quickly enough when police officers ordered them to leave a McDonald’s during a disturbance.
Lowery, who has also been a constant presence in Ferguson since the town first made headlines, agreed that the media deserves a certain amount of criticism.
“As a whole, I do think there are some real issues in terms of how ‘the media’ as a whole covers any ‘breaking news’ event or developing story. I also think that ‘the media’ often provides unfair coverage of communities of color,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Both Reilly and Lowery, however, rejected the notion that journalists on the ground in Ferguson are somehow responsible for the violent protests that have captured the nation’s attention.
“[A]ny suggestion that what has happened in Ferguson would not have without the media is disingenuous and ignores the deep tensions that have existed in this region for decades,” Lowery said.
Reilly said: “In any major story like this, you’re going to have a number of media failures and mistakes.”
However, the Huffington Post reporter added, “I don’t think that it’s fair to say that all reporters who were there were stoking any kind of violence.”
The two reporters separately told the Washington Examiner that they believe the presence of 24-hour television cameras likely did more harm than good when tensions were at their greatest.
“There has been a lot of fair criticism of the coverage in the television realm,” Reilly said, “because you saw this last week when you saw all these cameras rolling around, especially in August, creating problems for the police trying to figure out how to handle a situation like this. It caused a lot of problems.”
Some cable news personalities, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN’s Don Lemon, found themselves swept up in the Ferguson protests, the former being pelted by rocks and the latter caught up in a confrontation with police.
Reilly also said that, while he didn’t want to paint with “too broad of a brush,” some of the international journalists covering Ferguson behaved as if they were “waiting for things to burn.”
Lowery emphasized “a distinction between many of the writers who are in town and some of the television news coverage. I do think that the presence of cameras and 24-hour coverage can, at times, [inflame] tension.”
A similar point was made in August when Fox News’ Kurtz asked whether media cameras were “exacerbating the violence.”
Lowery also disagreed with the idea that reporters covering Ferguson have behaved as activists and not as persons charged with impartially recording events, as conservative writer Noah Rothman claimed.
“The news media did not come to Ferguson to chronicle events but to correct historical wrongs,” Rothman wrote for Commentary magazine in early November.
“The media’s detachment in the 1960s during episodes of unrest in Harlem, Watts, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, and even at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago has been studied and criticized by two generations of journalism scholars and J-school teachers, many of whom believe that the doctrine of objectivity is merely a way of maintaining an unjust status quo.”
As a result, Rothman added, “the press almost certainly overcompensated on the streets of Ferguson. Too often, journalists intensified the already simmering air of crisis.”
And Rothman is far from alone in suggesting that reporters in Ferguson intensified the crisis by behaving poorly.
Lowery agreed that certain members of the press brought their personal agendas to Ferguson, but he rejected Rothman’s “broad” generalizations.
“Sure, some members of the media came to drive specific agendas, so many others came to try to tell the stories of Ferguson — which I think my colleagues at the Post have done well,” he said.
“ ‘The media’ is a convenient whipping boy, in large part because it’s a broad group of people and publications. How can we … compare CNN to the Washington Post to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to some guy with a livestream camera to Politico Magazine to a political columnist working from his or her basement to talk radio/cable news talking heads?” he asked.
Reilly stands by his reporting: “I’m proud of the work that the HuffPost team has done on Ferguson over the past few months, including highlighting a lot of the volunteer work done by members of the community.”
He added that he and Huffington Post reporter Mariah Stewart will stick with the Ferguson beat until at least September 2015.
Lowery, for his part, said: “I think it says something that, after months of coverage, the protest leaders, community leaders, local elected officials, business owners and, yes, law enforcement officials and officials in the prosecutor’s office still promptly return my calls and emails and frequently reach out to compliment my coverage. I think that speaks for itself.”
