New York Times' Brown obit touched by lesser angels

And that hashtag, #noangel, has marked thousands of appropriately snarky responses:

As the Twitter machine makes clear, the implications in that graf range from stupid to offensive. That one has to be free of sin to be what the Times deems angelic, that the assortment of youthful indiscretions, not to mention, god forbid, taking up “rapping,” demotes you to fallen status, and that not being this NYT-anointed heavenly creature means there is still some question about whether Wilson’s killing of Brown was justified are all concepts inherent in that passage and all concepts that make it almost impossible to take the rest of the piece (not to mention anything else the NYT says about Ferguson and its aftermath) seriously.

The Times has already responded, asking critics to read the entire piece — which all critics, of course, should do — and pointing out that the “no angel” in paragraph five is a reference to the story’s opening vignette: 

Yeah … no. Not only does that not justify the use of a loaded term in a story that aspires to nuance, it does not excuse the racism, classism and phony balance that infects the fifth paragraph, with or without the bad literary gimmick.

And it is a really bad gimmick.

Brown was not claiming to be an angel with his story — if one were to read anything into it, it would be something closer to Michael Brown’s attempt to communicate to his parents his feelings about bigger-picture conflicts of good and evil and their connection to his evolving identity and religious beliefs — but that’s what the NYT “explanation” implies.

And that explanation, inaccurate though it may be, compounds the problems with this story and peels back another layer on the Times’ coverage of Ferguson throughout.

The Times seems intent on letting the world know they are not taking sides in this … oh, let’s call it a “dispute.” That, they would tell you, is what balanced, unbiased journalists do. “Brown seems to be the victim of an unjustified police shooting,” you can hear the Times say, “but accounts vary.” A cop did shoot Michael Brown six times, but, to be fair, Brown did dabble in alcohol and drugs … and rap music … and a surveillance camera maybe caught him shoplifting cigars — that is the inference of the original story and the later NYT explanation.

That tripe as trope is so egregious not only because it blurs the role of police, promoting them from law enforcers to “judge, jury and executioner” status, but because it propagates the purposeful muddying done by defenders of Officer Wilson and the Ferguson police.

When, on August 15, the Ferguson police chief named Wilson as the officer that killed Brown, he also released surveillance video and 19 pages of incident reports allegedly tying Brown to the lifting of those cigars hours before his death. The implication was clear — Wilson was in pursuit of a suspected criminal when the shooting occurred — but it wasn’t true. As the Ferguson police later admitted, Wilson knew nothing about the cigars when he encountered Brown (in fact, it later emerged that the store hadn’t even called in a complaint); Wilson was stopping Brown for walking in the street.

And yet, here Brown is, on his way to being buried, not because he was shot after getting stopped for jaywalking, but because his fall from grace included being caught on camera stealing cigars and pushing a store clerk.

It’s surprising the Times wasn’t more careful. Today’s story comes just days after the NYT’s own public editor rebuked the news page for an August 20 front-page story where it drew an unjustifiable equality between eyewitness accounts of Brown's shooting and unattributed police statements casting doubts on those stories. Public Editor Margaret Sullivan called it “an object lesson in the problems of dubious equivalency and anonymous sources.”

Times Deputy National Editor James Dao pushed back saying, basically, that reporting is hard, and that he thought this story was “fair and balanced.”

Yes, he really said those words.

No doubt Dao believes that, and no doubt he believes that justifies the Times going all contrapuntal on us. But that sort of justification, and that sort of writing, be it in the Wednesday story or today’s profile, serves the Times a lot more than it does its readers. It does more to reinforce a brand image and the paper’s standing with established power than it does to inform, well, anyone.

It is a flaw built in to the system, or, at least, what the system has become — from the need for every story to have a “guide” or start with an anecdote, to the reliance on literary devices when time or budget don’t allow for more reporting.

The Brown obit is nothing but a collection of random stories. The attempt to give it structure, meaning or a theme sets the piece up for its fall. Instead of leading with the fully drawn picture — the news as reported — it leads with a sketch, and that sketch leads to a loaded cliché.

How loaded? How much of a cliché? So much so that cartoonist Matt Bors used it to criticize exactly what the New York Times did here eight days before they actually did it.

Yeah. Like that.

It is in pieces like this NYT drive-by that the distance between the Gray Lady and her subjects seems greatest. It is well on annoying when a Times lifestyle piece talks about the Hamptons as if everyone goes there, but it is downright damaging when the paper — when any news service, really — treats the characters in a story, like, well, characters in a story. This is not fiction. These are not clever composites — they’re real people — and their real pain is not healed through the artist’s interpretation.

Or if not exactly an artist’s interpretation, a museum-quality recreation — like those dioramas of prehistoric life at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The dinosaur bones in the next hall are real, the dioramas are educated guesses, but under the roof of an esteemed museum, all are considered equally “true.”

When the NYT gets lazy twice inside a week, the distance between Times Square and Ferguson feels as great as that between the Cretaceous period and today.

Would the New York Times have described Thomas Jefferson the way it did Michael Brown? Will the obituaries of Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever say that either man “was no angel?” Doubtful.

Perhaps that is not entirely fair. The span of Michael Brown’s accomplishments doesn’t really rival a U.S. president. If you wrote about Clinton or Bush at age 18, maybe their petty crimes would have outweighed their better traits. But Clinton and Bush were given an opportunity to accumulate more biography. Brown, due to the fact that a police officer shot him six times, was not.

The editors of the New York Times did Brown a grave disservice (quite literally), but their lack of editing also let one of their writers twist in the wind today — there is no way that paragraph or that half-baked “angel” device should have made it to publication.

But going forward, their embrace of a catchphrase and a story media companies like to use to avoid making some hard choices — choices about right and wrong and choices about how to allocate resources — that’s today’s big indiscretion. One the nearly 163-year-old paper can’t attribute to youth.

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UPDATE: New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has now posted a response to the storm of criticism heaped upon today’s Brown profile. She said using the words “no angel” was a “regrettable mistake,” but she defends the story overall.

The author, John Eligon, who the editorial post identifies as “a 31-year-old black man himself,” said he is sensitive to the issues raised in the debate over his article. Eligon said the phrase is meant as a turn on the opening vignette, which he said is “about as positive as you can get.”

Eligon did say that he urged his editors to make changes to parts of the story that referenced rap. “Rapping is just rapping. It’s not indicative of someone’s character,” Eligon told Sullivan.

It is not clear if the story as published reflects Eligon’s desired changes.

Absent from all this, though, are the underlying problems — the reason this piece was written the way it was in the first place or the institutional biases that allowed this story to get past the editor.