Noah Rothman's Taking Sides In Ferguson

The death of the young African American Michael Brown, in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, sparked the national debate of whether or not his death was the act of prejudice at the hand of a Caucasian police officer. The media rushed to Ferguson and sided with the renegade protestors in order to cover the violent riots following his death. Although the riots lasted for months, journalist Noah Rothman wrote “Taking Sides in Ferguson” approximately two months after Michael Brown’s death. Rothman makes the strong case that the media’s direct role in Ferguson increased the violence of the rioters. However, he weakens his argument, because he bases his argument on the debatable assumptions that the media chose sides wrongly, were reporting rumor as fact, and that their commentary directly increased the violence; …show more content…
The first debatable assumption in Rothman’s argument is that the media made the wrong decision in siding with the protestors. To illustrate his claim, Rothman makes the passionate case that the media should remain impartial, when he states, “The Press has not played a neutral, dispassionate role in its intensive of the upheaval” (18). The author fails to note that rarely do newspapers and news websites operate without some form of partiality. Many people read certain newspapers for the journalist’s commentary; because the views of the author are opinions the reader can agree with. To convince his audience that the media sided with the protestors, Rothman uses good examples. One example Rothman uses to highlight the media’s bias in regard to Ferguson was the headline by The Daily Beast, “What you gonna do? Kill Us?”(19). This headline produced by the national media and the commentary of the