September 3, 2019,  Uncategorized  No comments

“No Angel” of a Reporter

         The phrase “no angel” used in an article describing an 18-year-old on the day of his funeral was a poor choice of words, by any moral standards.

         Michael Brown was an 18-year-old that was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. After Brown’s death, reporter John Eligon of the New York Times wrote a front-page profile of Brown in which he described the deceased in a poor light using phrases such as “no angel,” and “handful,” among others.

         In Margaret Sullivan, a New York Times Reporter’s critique of Eligon’s article, she stated that Eligon simply wanted to write the article to give insight to Brown’s life, the “deeper story” Eligon said.

         Insulting a person that cannot defend themselves in a publication is immoral, and seems libelous. Eligon stated that he wished he used a phrase such as “wasn’t perfect” rather than “no angel,” in what he called a “full, mostly positive picture” of Brown.

         Sullivan said that protests of the article go so far as to say that the Times is suggesting that Brown deserved to die because of all the flaws that Eligon pointed out, with little evidence of the contrary. The article does not, by any means, say Brown deserved to die, but in using poor wording of someone who was killed, it was only a matter of time before readers began to believe this.

         While Eligon’s intentions may have been to profile the man’s life, others had a different interpretation.

         The timing of this article being published (the day of Brown’s funeral) was insensitive and poor. A positive for the article was that Eligon followed AP style and did not have any noticeable grammatical errors, and seemingly did what he attempted to do, which was to give more information on Brown’s life.

         Poor choices in wording left readers of the article questioning Eligon’s sensitivity and ethics, but he did what he truly intended on doing.