In order not to be taken in by the text, you need to appreciate the newspaper in which it was published. The Guardian would be viscerally opposed to the decision not to prosecute the policeman involved (whatever the actual facts) and to any idea that there could be such a thing as a good policeman, or that one showing some humanity could possibly be representative. It's a mindset. It's unshakable.
Jeremy,
Out of curiosity can you post a link to any article or editorial from the Guardian that supports your above contention ? Were they opposed to the decision not to prosecute (once the grand jury handed down a 'no indictment' verdict) ? I haven't followed the reports in the British press, so I really don't know - but I do suspect that it's not so much a British opinion, more a populist American one.
The facts are not disputed, the grand jury has come to the only decision possible in the face of perjury by some witnesses and irrefutable forensic evidence. What happened in Ferguson last week (and the preceding ones) was a display of unadulterated adult delinquency. A national disgrace. A rampage of arson, looting and vandalism, stores and shops firebombed and wrecked. Police ordered not to interfere. Mob violence. Civil rights of law-abiding Americans systematically violated and ( temporarily) abrogated.
Neither the American President nor his Attorney General fulfilled their oaths. Worse.
So is the photograph a lie ?
' A picture does not have to be staged to be a lie. It just has to be massively unrepresentative of the wider facts' - and in the context that the Oregonian printed it, it probably is - and
that is what the Guardian said.
M
