Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that CNN tried to create conflict in Ferguson, Missouri, during the protests and riots that followed the death of Michael Brown. He is obviously and undeniably correct.
The Black Lives Matter activism and protests that were born in Ferguson were built on a lie. In 2014, Michael Brown was shot while in the act of attacking police officer Darren Wilson, who acted in self-defense. Brown had started a physical confrontation with Wilson and tried to seize Wilson’s gun. A grand jury would later decline to charge Wilson with any crime, and former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, led by then-Attorney General Eric Holder, determined that Wilson acted in self-defense.
But that didn’t stop the narrative from forming that racism was at play. Brown was black and Wilson was white, and therefore, racism was the only possible explanation for what happened. CNN not only embraced this narrative wholesale, but it also helped to stir up racial conflict when race was not a factor.
A narrative formed that Wilson had actually had his hands up and was surrendering, which was disproven by various investigations. CNN could have focused its journalistic efforts on determining whether that was true. Instead, a CNN panel displayed the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. Margaret Hoover later completely brushed over her participation in that inflammatory act in a CNN opinion piece to lecture Republicans about racism. Emanuella Ginsberg later said that the slogan and gesture resonate “regardless of evidence.”
Hey are we still talking about disinformation? pic.twitter.com/506aRzLg2k
— Zachary Faria (@ZacharyFaria) April 22, 2022
The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was named by the Washington Post as “one of the most outlandish claims of 2015.”
CNN reported the “hands up” narrative as fact in a piece titled “5 things to know about Michael Brown’s shooting.” Don Lemon said white people were in “willful denial” over racism in Ferguson. Chris Cuomo bought the claims of witnesses who said Brown’s hands were up at face value. It was later determined to be false, thanks to physical and forensic evidence.
CNN was not alone in doing all this, of course. Legacy media jumped and continue to jump on the Black Lives Matter narratives about Brown and other cases, even where virtually no evidence exists that racism was involved and regardless of whether officers did anything wrong. But they were a part of stirring conflict over an incident without waiting for the facts to emerge or searching for those facts as “the most trusted name in news.”
There is no denying that CNN has reveled in conflict for years. The network played a huge part in the smears against Brett Kavanaugh and consistently got stories wrong while trying to score political points against the Trump administration. It also did as much as it could to get Donald Trump the Republican nomination in 2016, perhaps correctly understanding that the inevitable political combat this would cause would revive CNN’s ratings. But the stoking of racial tensions has been CNN’s most societally destructive behavior. The network has yet to reckon with the damage that years of fabricated and trumped-up racial narratives have done to the country.
