re: #213 Charles Johnson

Law enforcement uses media outlets to seed their version of events. All papers have beat writers with contacts in law enforcement, and will run with those stories.

The key graf for the Byers tweets:

On FMLA from paper. Earlier tweets did not meet standards for publication.

— Christine Byers (@ChristineDByers) August 19, 2014

There it is.

As I suspected as soon as I read it, the implications of her tweet are not borne out by verifiable facts. My speculation: these dozen or so “witnesses” she was tipped off about by her police source are NOT EYEWITNESSES to the shooting. Rather, they are a dozen or more people who have all heard Darren Wilson’s version of the events, and all are therefore hearsay witnesses. all leading back to Wilson as the sole source.

Meanwhile, her uncorroborated, unverified claim is posted on multiple websites as fact, and Jake Tapper himself RTed her explosive claim into the Internet, presumably without performing any of the elementary fact-checking I have performed for this blog post.

There’s nothing to those “accounts” corroborating the Wilson version of events because they’re not witnesses to the event. They’re simply looking at whatever Wilson provided to investigators, and they’re simply agreeing with it.

This is journalistic malpractice, and Tapper’s hardly alone in this. Other outlets are giving the “Josie” version equal footing with known eyewitnesses who have a different (but consistent with each other witnesses, video, and physical evidence such as we are able to glean from video/autopsies, etc.).