Protestors stood outside the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Monday dressed as old-time newsies and passed out mock-up papers yelling, “Extra, extra. Read all about it. Post-Dispatch changes its name to Post-Disgrace.”
The group said they are tired of the newspaper printing inaccuracies, pointing to the most recent article on Michael Brown’s autopsy that was written by crime reporter Christine Byers and medical news reporter Blythe Bernhard.
For that story, Bernhard called San Francisco-based forensic pathologist Judy Melinek asking her to analyze Michael Brown’s official autopsy report as prepared by the St. Louis County Medical Examiner, Dr. Michael Graham.
“I read the report, and spent half an hour on the phone with the reporter explaining Michael Brown’s autopsy report line-by-line, and I told her not to quote me – but that I would send her quotes she could use in an email,” Melinek wrote in her recent blog post. “The next morning, I found snippets of phrases from our conversation taken out of context in her article in the Post-Dispatch. These inaccurate and misleading quotes were picked up and disseminated by other journals, blogs, and websites.”
The reporters quoted Melinek as saying that the autopsy “supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun, if he has gunpowder particulate material in the wound.” She added, “If he has his hand near the gun when it goes off, he’s going for the officer’s gun.”
Melinek said she said didn’t say he was going for the gun. She said, “The hand wound has gunpowder particles on microscopic examination, which suggests that it is a close-range wound. That means that Mr. Brown’s hand would have been close to the barrel of the gun.”
Protestors said these misleading quotes are just one of the many complaints they have with the newspaper’s reporting on the Michael Brown case.
Activist Elizabeth Vega said Byers has tweeted false information that favored the police regarding eyewitness accounts.
“The Post-Dispatch needs to show some accountability and move her to a different beat,” Vega said of Byers. “Her articles are filled with narrative from the police’s perspective. We are not asking the Post-Dispatch to only show our side. We’re just asking to at least show our side as much as they show the police’s.”
Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson stayed and talked with protestors on the street for about an hour, even though it was his day off, he said. He was the only newspaper staff member that spent any length of time talking with protestors. Reporters Michael Sorkin and Jeremy Kohler also came out briefly.
Regarding photos, protestors brought up Carson’s shot of Ferguson protestors at a St. Louis Rams game. The photo that editors selected for the paper was one of two women protestors who appeared to be hitting a white male on his back with the American flag. Even though the caption stated that the protesters were reclaiming the flag after a fan tried to steal it, the photo made protesters look violent, Vega said. In Carson’s website slideshow of the event, the photo right before shows the male fan holding the flag with aggressive expression while a black woman meekly tried to grab the flag back.
Vega told Carson that there have been many opportunities for the newspaper to show protesters looking peaceful, but that “doesn’t fit with their violent protestor storyline.”
Carson disagreed but said, “The great part is you have every right to come out here and hold us accountable.”
However, that was not the welcome that protestors experienced when they first stepped on the sidewalk on the side of the newspaper’s building at 900 N. Tucker Boulevard. When the first protestors arrived at 11 a.m., a security guard told them to, “get the f**k off our property.”
Police, who came to patrol the protest, allowed them to stay on the sidewalk.
