The mainstream media has seized on bombshell video footage showing that Michael Brown may not have robbed a convenience store shortly before he was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. But they omitted the fact that the video also appears to show he was dealing drugs with the clerk.
The newly uncovered video footage of Brown—the unarmed black man whose 2014 shooting death by police officer Darren Wilson sparked violent protest in Ferguson and gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement—shows that Brown does not appear to be robbing the store.
Instead, security footage released by a documentary filmmaker appears to show Brown making a drug deal with store clerks in exchange for the cigarillos he was later accused of stealing. He’s seen exchanging what looks like a baggie of marijuana for cigarillo boxes at 1 a.m. on the day of his shooting death.
On Sunday, the media used the new footage to criticize the police and validate the assumption that the police officer shot Brown without apparent reason. The New York Times, for instance, wrote an article titled “New Ferguson Video Adds Wrinkle to Michael Brown Case,” burying the alleged drug deal in its article as a passing reference.
The article focused on how the footage contradicts the police statement that Brown committed a store robbery, writing that “a new documentary is raising new questions about what happened in the hours before the shooting on Aug. 9, 2014.”
The Huffington Post followed the Times‘ example, writing that the video released by a documentary filmmaker “disproves the police narrative of the events that led to the death of Michael Brown.”
The liberal media outlet describes the alleged drug deal as “trade” and downplayed the significance of the evidence, adding: “Brown’s relatives maintain that the Ferguson Market convenience store had a history of being involved with local drug deals.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, may be the worst offender when it comes to characterizing the new footage, stating that the new video disproves the police department narrative of Brown committing store robbery, as it was just “the aftermath of a prearranged exchange gone wrong between Brown and a group of store clerks.”
The article doesn’t explicitly mention Brown’s drug dealing, only suggests that he handed “something” to store clerks that “the filmmakers believe to be a small bag of marijuana.”
“They inspect the bag and appear to smell it, the footage shows, then hand Brown what the documentary claims is a plastic bag containing two large boxes of cigarillos,” it added. “Brown turns to leave, the new video shows, then passes the cigarillos back across the counter for what the documentary characterizes as safekeeping.”
