Looking back on the death and destruction in Ferguson, we can see the dirty hands of the media, especially CNN, now basking in the glow of (relatively) high ratings. Racial violence is a ratings booster and winner.

It is certainly correct to say, as the media have said millions of times, that a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager to death in Ferguson. But this was never the whole truth, and the media knew it. After all, the Trayvon Martin case had proven that the idea of innocent black teenagers being killed for no reason didn’t stand up to scrutiny. In that case, like that of Michael Brown, we discovered the case involved a marijuana-abusing young thug with criminal activity in his background. Martin and Brown turned out to be the aggressors, a fact that comports with statistics on racial violence in America that few in the media want to talk about.

Read the full column, Media Have Dirty Hands from Ferguson, by Cliff Kincaid, at Accuracy in Media.