Guest post by Kristinn Taylor
Frustrated WaPo Sics Nine Reporters on Darren Wilson — Finds Nothing
Who does the Post think he is, Sarah Palin?
Missing and unmentioned in the Post article are any complaints of mistreatment or racism by Officer Wilson from residents of Jennings and Ferguson prior to the Brown shooting.
The Washington Post published a long article Saturday night–more than seventy paragraphs–with three bylines and six supporting reporters looking for dirt on Officer Darren Wilson–an effort unmatched by the media since Sarah Palin’s official emails were released from her time as Alaska governor.
Officer Wilson is the white Ferguson, Missouri policeman who shot unarmed black 18 year old robber Michael Brown in a confrontation in the middle of a neighborhood street minutes after Brown roughed up a clerk while stealing about $48 worth of cigarellos. A friend of Brown’s who accompanied him in the robbery and was with him at the time of the confrontation with Officer Wilson was unharmed in the incident.
The headline of the Post’s article is, Darren Wilson’s First Job Was on a Troubled Police Force Disbanded by Authorities.
The lede is:
“The small city of Jennings, Mo., had a police department so troubled, and with so much tension between white officers and black residents, that the city council finally decided to disband it. Everyone in the Jennings police department was fired. New officers were brought in to create a credible department from scratch.
“That was three years ago. One of the officers who worked in that department, and lost his job along with everyone else, was a young man named Darren Wilson.
“Some of the Jennings officers reapplied for their jobs, but Wilson got a job in the police department in the nearby city of Ferguson.”
It is only until the last sentence of the twelfth paragraph that the Post bothers to mention that Officer Wilson was a clean cop on a dirty force:
“What he found in Jennings, however, was a mainly white department mired in controversy and notorious for its fraught relationship with residents, especially the African American majority. It was not an ideal place to learn how to police. Officials say Wilson kept a clean record without any disciplinary action.”
One has to delve deeper in the article to learn that Officer Wilson was honored by Ferguson and praised by his superiors in Jennings for his clean record.
Wilson won a commendation this year after he subdued a man who was found to be involved in a drug transaction, and he was honored in a ceremony in the Town Council chambers.
““My impression is he didn’t go above and beyond, and he didn’t get in any trouble,” Fuesting said.”
“Robert Orr, the former Jennings police chief who retired in 2010, said of Wilson: “He was a good officer with us. There was no disciplinary action.””
And that is all the Post reports on Officer Wilson’s honorable record.
The Post expresses great frustration that Officer Wilson has successfully hidden from the media —which in their reporting has drawn a virtual map to the house Officer Wilson lived in until he fled in fear for his life from racist liberals bent on lynch mob vengeance.
The Post laments that Officer Wilson and those close to him have chosen to remain silent and that his online accounts have been scrubbed. However the Post warns Officer Wilson, “But everyone leaves a record, and Darren Dean Wilson is no exception.” Note the use by the Post of Officer Wilson’s middle name.
Missing and unmentioned in the Post article are any complaints of mistreatment or racism by Officer Wilson from residents of Jennings and Ferguson prior to the Brown shooting.
The Post works hard to paint Officer Wilson as something he’s not but just can’t make the case so they try to bury a good cop under guilt by association with their reporting in the article about the troubled police forces where he worked.
Incredibly, the Post’s timeline of the Brown incident in the article fails to report the strong arm robbery Brown was seen on video committing just minutes before he was confronted by Officer Wilson.
The Post also maligns the Ferguson police department with an unsourced attack that it drops in the article without further explanation.
“A newly released report by a nonprofit group of lawyers identifies Ferguson as a city that gets much of its revenue from fines generated by police in mundane citations against residents — what the group calls a poor-people’s tax.”
As part of their dirt digging, the Post goes in to Officer Wilson’s troubled family history and finds he did not get in to trouble.
The Post could have written an uplifting story about a young man who rose above his turbulent childhood to become an exemplary police officer only to have his life ruined by a race-baiting liberal lynch mob. Instead out of more than seventy paragraphs there only four measly sentences that inform readers Officer Wilson is a clean cop.
Here are the names of the nine reporters credited by the Post for their article on Officer Wilson:
By Carol D. Leonnig, Kimberly Kindy and Joel Achenbach August 23 at 10:22 PM
Achenbach reported from Washington. Chico Harlan, DeNeen Brown, Sarah Larimer and Krissah Thompson in Ferguson and Alice Crites and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
Kimberly Kindy is a government accountability reporter at The Washington Post.
