Ferguson: bubbles and bias

In this blog, I usually write about traditional crafts and ways of life, and I don’t usually delve into anything too political. Today, though, I’ve been watching my old neighbourhoods in flames on the global news. I thought an interview I did last month for the C-Realm podcast on events in Ferguson, Missouri would be quite timely right now. The transcript has been made and published with the permission of KMO, who runs the C-Realm. It does not purport to be a perfect word-for-word transcript, but instead captures the gist of the conversation. 

KMO: … I deliberately avoid any reference to the current news cycle, because I want to create things that will be of interest to people a few years down the line, people who avoid a rehash of what’s in the news. So now it is the first of October, and I’m just now getting around to airing an episode that talks about events that got started on August 9, 2014, when, in Ferguson, Missouri – a suburb of St. Louis – a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed a young African-American man named Michael Brown. He shot Michael Brown six times, twice in the head. All that is undisputed by anyone; what is disputed is what led up to the shooting. Nobody claims that Brown had a gun of his own, but some witnesses say that Brown kept advancing toward Wilson, other eyewitnesses say he had his hands in the air …

Something else that is not in dispute is that people responded very badly to the Ferguson Police Department’s behaviour after the shootings, so much so that the protests that followed might not just have been about a white police officer shooting a black man, but might have a lot to do with how the police had been very secretive and obstructionist with their documents, and very stingy in handling those documents to people who were trying to get a handle on the incident … I have laid out a few facts that are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what is illustrated by the events of August and September in Ferguson, Missouri … 

Brian, welcome to the C-Realm podcast. You write for a variety of magazines and other outlets, including Mother Earth News and Grit, and about the time things were getting crazy in the news cycle around Ferguson, Missouri you published a piece in American Conservative about the topic. You have a particular vantage point most journalists don’t enjoy – you grew up in the town right next to Ferguson, Missouri. I want to know what you think the media coverage of Ferguson indicates.

Brian: Sure. I grew up in Florissant, Missouri, about a kilometre from the edge of Ferguson – both of them started out as small Missouri towns that got enveloped by the post-war suburbs of St. Louis – and I had a big Irish-American family with lots of cousins, most of whom still live in the area. I rode my bicycle through there as a child, went to my first school dance there, and I had my first gig as a radio DJ at the community college, right across the road from a building that got burned to the ground by rioters in the last few weeks.

We’ve lived in rural Ireland for the last decade or so, and when everything started happening in Ferguson I was on holiday in Scotland with my daughter, taking a little boat around some rocky islands, without phone or internet service. It was only after I came back that I saw that my old neighbourhood was the leading story in Ireland, the UK, across much of the planet; for a while it was bigger than Gaza, bigger than Ukraine, and the images were hard to tell apart sometimes.

The media’s coverage was fascinating to me, because it was like the film Rashomon, a Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa where a court is trying to reconstruct a murder, but every witness tells a different story that makes themselves look good. In the same way, every blog and news outlet told a different version of what was going on, one that suited whatever their audience wanted to believe. I’ve been a reporter for city newspapers -- I still write a weekly column for an Irish newspaper here, as well as articles for Mother Earth News, Grit, American Conservative, First Things, Resilience, and so on – so I knew what the media is like, and come away with a realistic picture of how it works.

Most Americans I know believe very strongly that the media are biased, and when I said that different media outlets were publishing different versions, most people assumed I was talking about a conspiracy. But genuine conspiracy-theory situations are quite rare in the real world, while bias is unavoidable and not automatically bad.

People say the media are biased when it’s a bias different than their own. Anyone in the American media – talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh or television stars like Jon Stewart – all complain about the media, but the media are never themselves; the media is always someone else. And they can all say the media are biased, because bias is whatever you’re opinion isn’t.

But when you write a news article, by definition you’re cramming a complicated situation into a few paragraphs, and by picking and choosing one detail over another you’re choosing what you think is the most vivid and realistic version of the truth. The problem is not that the report has a bias; the problem is that most Americans I talk to are getting only one perspective on any subject -- the one that suits their fancy -- rather than looking at a situation from many constructive angles.

Other writers made many important points about Ferguson -- that local police officers, in gear and attitude, more and more resemble soldiers occupying our cities; that the people of Ferguson were made prisoners in their own homes, that many black men in America say they experience constant harassment from police, and so on. I saw some articles writing about how this article from a net neutrality standpoint, saying that this article was downplayed on searches inside the USA – if that’s true, that’s extremely serious for democracy, because that’s how people get their information these days. All of those are important.

When I wrote about Ferguson, though, I didn’t write about any of those things – and I got some criticism from people who thought I was skipping over things like the difficulties of being black in America. But I’m not the person to write about that – I’m not black and I’m not in America. Others have written about it eloquently, and I don’t have anything to add. I could, however, see a few things because of my background that other reporters could not.

 ... to be continued tomorrow.