Showing posts with label Baltimore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baltimore. Show all posts

Friday, January 19, 2024

Baltimore’s New Nonprofit Outlet Looks a Lot Like the Same Old Corporate News

The Baltimore Banner, an online news outlet, broke a story in November (11/2/23) about a man’s death being ruled a homicide due to “trauma to the body.” The man, Paul Bertonazzi, had been transported by Baltimore Police to Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital, where he died five days later. The death occurred in January 2023, but the ruling had just been determined.

The original version of the story was short on details, with information vaguely sourced to “Baltimore Police.” It described the man (initially unidentified) as “combative” and self-harming. A second article (11/3/23) on the evolving story was published the next day with more information, including that the man’s spine had been severed at some point. That article includes quotes from a police report.

Baltimore Banner: Man’s death at Johns Hopkins Hospital ruled a homicide, Baltimore detectives investigating

Baltimore Banner (11/2/23)

Despite limited information, the Banner’s articles prematurely exonerate the police in Bertonazzi’s death, taking the police’s own account of his behavior and the officers’ actions at face value while focusing blame on the hospital.

It is perhaps not surprising that Baltimore media published a police-friendly story relying on partial and questionable information, sourced to the police themselves. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (9/22/23), the Baltimore Sun and other news outlets played a major role in perpetuating false stories about what happened to Freddie Gray by uncritically repeating Baltimore Police claims.

Yet unlike the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Banner is not a corporate news outlet. It is a nonprofit news outlet that was introduced in 2022 as a promised corrective to the Sun’s habits of reporting. Since its founding, the Banner has stirred up controversy on social media for actions, statements and stories that seemingly perpetuate the worst habits of its corporate news competitor, including “police say” journalism.

In the Bertonazzi case, despite a lack of evidence, the Banner repeatedly concluded that he must have been killed by violence while a patient at the hospital. The second story ended with some background on “serious events” happening in Maryland hospitals. A followup story (11/9/23) was even more emphatic: “Violence at Maryland Hospitals Was a Concern Before a Death at Hopkins Was Ruled a Homicide,” the headline stated.

At the same time, the Banner gave space for the police to seemingly implicate Bertonazzi himself and/or his pre-existing injury in his death. The second article (11/3/23) cited a police report claiming Bertonazzi “said his neck hurt,” and was “hitting his head against the inside of the van” while in the midst of a “behavioral crisis” during his arrest.

Red flags from Freddie Gray case

Baltimore Banner: Video shows man who died at Johns Hopkins Hospital moving, talking before arrival at facility

Baltimore Banner (11/3/23)

For long-time observers of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), these claims struck a familiar chord: Police said the exact same things about Freddie Gray, who was fatally injured in BPD police custody in 2015, including that he was banging his head in the van (Washington Post4/29/15). This turned out to be a false story, part of an effort to cover up brutal deadly force (and not the first time BPD has used that story). The Banner articles are filled with red flags that echo back to the Gray case, including that Bertonazzi was transported to the hospital in a police van instead of an ambulance, despite reports of serious medical and psychiatric symptoms.

Any number of things could have happened to cause Bertonazzi’s fatal injury, involving any number of parties and/or his preexisting condition. The details offered by the Banner belie its rhetorical effort to shift attention away from the police and onto the hospital. According to “medical staff,” he became immediately immobile upon entry, when he was transferred from the wheelchair to a board.

The Banner (11/3/23) released partial body camera footage showing Bertonazzi crying “help” and “you’re hurting me” before he was wheeled into the hospital, while police unsuccessfully commanded him to stand up. The news outlet describes the video as showing him “moving, talking” to explain why BPD exonerated the officers, as if that alone proves that his spine wasn’t damaged yet (another echo to the Gray case, in which police dismissed video of him crying out  in pain during his arrest).

A nonprofit business model 

The Baltimore Banner provides a case study in whether a shift to a nonprofit business model in newsrooms is enough to transform journalism. The news outlet was launched in 2022 in the midst of intensive public support for an alternative to the Baltimore Sun, which had been the only big game in town for decades.

In 2021, an investment firm, Alden Capital Group, was poised to purchase the Baltimore Sun’s owner, Tribune Publishing. A Vanity Fair article (4/5/21) about the takeover referred to Alden Capital as a “blood-sucking hedge fund.” A group called “Save Our Sun,” made up of Sun staffers and prominent locals, was hoping to beat Alden’s offer and transform the Sun into a nonprofit newspaper.

Another party interested in buying the Sun was Stewart Bainum, Jr., the CEO of Choice Hotels, the nursing home chain Manor Home Inc. and other corporations he inherited from his father. Bainum has also served as a Democrat in the Maryland General Assembly. He was framed as the possible “savior” of Baltimore media (Washington Post2/17/2110/26/21New York Times2/17/21) and won the support of the “Save Our Sun” team.

After losing his bid to Alden Capital, Bainum launched the Baltimore Banner as a separate nonprofit news outlet (known as the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, its parent organization, on tax documents). Bainum pledged $50 million over three and a half years. The Banner’s nonprofit status bought it an enormous amount of good will, with glowing articles months in advance of its launch.

The Baltimore Banner website launched in June 2022. In many ways, it was hard to distinguish from its corporate competitor. For one, most of its articles were behind a paywall. (Both the Banner and Sun charge about $20/month after an introductory period.) Many other nonprofit news outlets with similar multi-million budgets, like the Texas Tribune or ProPublica, offer their content for free.

In developing its business model, the Banner consulted with the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit organization that runs the Philadelphia Inquirer, which does charge for subscriptions (Washington Post10/26/21). The Inquirer was often described as a model for the Banner. Yet, unlike the Banner, the Inquirer is a for-profit limited liability corporation owned by a nonprofit. There are very few nonprofit news outlets comparable to the Banner that make readers pay for news.

Ties to the corporate world

Baltimore Banner: About Us graphic

The Baltimore Banner‘s “About Us” page promises “to be an indispensable resource that strengthens, unites and inspires our Baltimore community…through trustworthy, quality journalism that tells the varied stories of our people.”

One issue might be the lack of nonprofit leadership experience at the Banner. The news outlet didn’t have a board of directors until about six months after it launched. With two exceptions (including Bainum’s wife, an actor), the Banner’s executive team and board of directors are composed of people from the corporate world, including corporate media.

So are most of its reporters. The Banner’s first prominent hires came from the Baltimore Sun, including its managing editors and numerous reporters. Although the Banner’s newsroom is more diverse than at the Sun, with an editorial staff that is about 27% people of color, the city has a roughly 70% non-white population. Meanwhile, the crime, politics and “enterprise” (investigations) desks are still overwhelmingly staffed with white reporters. (This data doesn’t include the “Banner Bot,” an AI function that pens a regular column on real estate and has no race.)

While the Banner’s subscription prices caused some online stir, the outlet also drew attention for its relationships with local corporations. The Baltimore Brew (6/9/23) reported that the Banner was getting a discount on rent from a major real estate development company.

The Banner also ran ads from Atlas Restaurant Group, a mammoth company owned by Alexander Smith, whose family owns the conservative Sinclair Broadcasting Group. Atlas has faced controversy for policies that restrict service based on racist and arbitrarily enforced dress codes. Atlas also catered the Banner’s launch event, and the Banner has continued to hold events at Atlas Restaurants, while giving the company significant uncritical press (e.g., 7/11/2310/2/2310/18/23).

The early marketing for the Banner emphasized its mission “to be an indispensable resource that strengthens, unites and inspires our Baltimore community.” Despite millions from Bainum, discounted rent and an income stream from ads, the community has had to pay for access.

Nonprofit news outlets can operate legally in a number of different ways, but the Baltimore Banner‘s chosen business model cost it much of its nonprofit sheen.

Controversial hires

Within its first few months as a news outlet, the Baltimore Banner also made a number of editorial choices that alienated local readers who were hopeful for a real alternative to corporate news.

When editor-in-chief Kimi Yoshino (who previously worked for the Los Angeles Times) proudly announced the hiring of former Baltimore Sun and ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis as editor-at-large (Twitter6/1/22), she faced immediate backlash. Many people reminded her that MacGillis had spent the previous two years minimizing the Covid pandemic and mocking Covid precautions. He was an extremist voice on the topic, comparing school closures to both South Africa’s apartheid and the Iraq War.

Tweet from Alec MacGillis comparing Covid prevention measures to the Iraq War.

Twitter (12/24/20)

Locals also reminded Yoshino that MacGillis had been, up until his hiring, retweeting prominent anti-trans activists who expressed concern about gender nonconformity. Yoshino didn’t respond to the criticism, and MacGillis was brought on board.

Baltimore Banner: Your political flags shouldn’t fly at our government buildings

Baltimore Banner (9/20/22)

Then, in September 2022, the Banner published an op-ed (9/20/22) from a man named Brian Griffiths, a “conservative activist,” according to his bio. He argued that government buildings shouldn’t fly pride flags: “You may see the transgender pride flag as a symbol of tolerance and acceptance,” he wrote. “I see it as a flag that denies the basic facts of biology and sex assigned at birth.” There was enormous outcry, with many people promising to cancel their subscriptions. Even several Banner reporters spoke out against the op-ed.

Yoshino published a written response (9/22/22), an “apology from the editor.” After expressing regret for causing harm, she defended her choices. She described Griffiths’ piece as “carefully edited” and reviewed by LGBTQ staffers. She insisted the Banner had a responsibility to share a “range of viewpoints.” Griffiths, she acknowledged, was hired to write a column from a conservative perspective.

At the time, the Banner had published only 14 of what it called “community voices,” and Griffiths had written four of those. None of the other op-ed writers had been published twice. He was the Banner’s first columnist, it seemed.

Yoshino’s response to the Griffiths outcry was her second public apology of sorts. She had apologized earlier in the year when the Banner published an op-ed (6/1/22), which is still online, that casually used the phrase “Jewtown” to describe a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

After the Griffiths debacle, Yoshino announced the hiring of a public editor, DeWayne Wickham, a former opinion writer for USA Today and founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, who wrote a regular column for the Banner over the next year. His columns occasionally commented on the Banner’s work, but mostly covered the media in general. At one point, Wickham (12/31/22) did come down on the Banner for a claim he felt wasn’t substantiated. That criticism was tucked into a mostly positive review of the outlet’s work to date. His next article (1/2/23) was an apology for criticizing his colleagues. (Wickham left the Banner in August 2023 and hasn’t been replaced.)

More recently, the Banner has seemed to temper its approach, no longer publishing Griffiths, for one. It hasn’t entirely backed away from inflammatory content, though. On November 17, 2023, its Twitter account posted a tweet that seemed to encapsulate the tension between its pursuit of a “range of viewpoints” and its civic-minded, nonprofit branding:

Baltimore Banner tweet promoting anti-vaccination letter

Twitter (11/17/23)

The Banner offered free access to this “health story,” which was a letter justifying opposition to vaccination. (The tweet has since been deleted, but the letter is still online.)

Accountability issues

Baltimore Banner: Filming halted for Baltimore TV series ‘Lady in the Lake’ after violence threatened against the cast, crew, police say

Baltimore Banner (8/27/22)

In its “Code of Conduct,” the Banner promises, “When we make a mistake, we are humble, admit our error and correct it,” and “if we ever stray from [our promises], readers should call us out and demand that we make amends.” Accountability and transparency remain ongoing issues for the outlet, as illustrated by the Banner‘s failure to “make amends” when it published a story that turned out to be unsubstantiated.

In August 2022, the Banner (8/27/22) reported that a Hollywood television production was shut down in Baltimore because drug dealers “threatened to shoot someone” and “attempted to extort $50,000 from the crew to stand down.” According to the Banner, “producers declined to pay.” The only source for the article was a Baltimore Police spokesperson.

The story was picked up by national news and entertainment press (e.g., Deadline8/28/22LA Times8/28/22). It fostered the common perception that Baltimore is overrun by criminality and an unsafe place to mount a production.

Tweets by Justin Fenton on Baltimore Banner movie set threat story

Twitter (8/28/22)

When Baltimore locals expressed doubts about the story on Twitter, one of its reporters, Justin Fenton, insisted that it was true. “It did happen,” he said to a skeptical commentator.

A few days later, the Banner (8/30/22) reported that it probably didn’t happen: “Police Scale Back Accusations Related to Alleged Threat on Set of ‘Lady in the Lake,’” the headline stated. Police had investigated the initial claim and it didn’t hold up. The chief BPD spokesperson described the first article as “preliminary information.”

The Banner published this second story as if it were passively updating the original story, with no mea culpa for its role in running with the initial account prematurely.  Fenton quietly deleted his tweets that had asserted that the incident “did happen.”

Issues with accountability and transparency are present in Fenton’s more recent articles on Bertonazzi, the man who died in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Certain claims are attributed to unidentified “police,” even though the Banner’s Code of Ethics insists that anonymous sources will be avoided:

When using information from an anonymous source, we include a reason why the source needs their name withheld…. Always, but especially in stories about politics or government, we examine requests for anonymity for possible ulterior motives.

The Code of Ethics also calls for transparency and specificity around corrections, but both Bertonazzi stories were updated many times without the specific updates noted, an ethical practice in journalism that shows readers how a story develops. What’s lost to the public is how the news outlet shaped its stories over time to support the police’s claims.

The Banner does deserve credit for some critical work that would likely not have appeared in the Baltimore Sun, including a series on healthcare in Maryland prisons and coverage for Baltimore’s large and growing immigrant population. But it hasn’t let go of the corporate media habit of publishing stories on policing sourced largely or exclusively by police (e.g., 11/7/23). It’s a particularly corrosive habit when the police are killers or suspects.

Competing for dollars 

Baltimore Banner: At the one-year mark, The Banner is finding its voice in Baltimore

Baltimore Banner (6/16/23)

On April 21, 2022, Former President Barack Obama mentioned the “encouraging trend” of nonprofit newsrooms popping up across the country, citing Baltimore in a list of cities. By itself, “nonprofit” is a neutral term, a business model. There are countless nonprofits dedicated to ending the rights of women to have abortions. Religious groups like Scientology are 501(c)3 nonprofits known to commit harm.

The Banner’s own former public editor (6/16/23) acknowledged that the news outlet had a long way to go to look different from corporate news: “At other times it looked a lot like the city’s traditional news organizations—which is to say it hasn’t always looked like something new and different in its first year,” Wickham wrote in a year-in-review:

Of course, that’s to be expected. Most of its reporters and editors came from—and honed their journalism in—the old-school newsrooms that the Banner is trying not to duplicate.

In an article in the Conversation (1/17/19), Bill Birnbauer writes about the “huge disparity” between large and successful nonprofit news outlets, established by “wealthy individual donors” providing “venture-like capital,” and smaller outlets which comprise the vast majority of nonprofit newsrooms and rely on fickle private funding.

There is a downside to an institution like the Baltimore Banner operating as a nonprofit, especially when its approach to the news has been so variable. There is only so much private charitable money available in the city.

The Baltimore Brew, a small news outlet, has long been on top of financial corruption in the city, breaking the story (7/16/20) that led to former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s recent federal conviction. The Baltimore Beat is Black-led and publishes a regular column on injustice in the courts. The Beat also publishes a monthly free print version, which is beneficial in a city that has many residents without internet access.

These and other independent Baltimore outlets will compete for funding with a nonprofit news site that is supported by a very wealthy businessman, has a revenue-driven business model, and was marketed aggressively as the savior of Baltimore media.

This article originally appeared in FAIR.org on December 21st, 2023.  


See Related Posts

The Baltimore Sun’s Reckoning on Freddie Gray, FAIR

New Right-Wing Owner to Baltimore Sun Reporters: 'Go Make Me Some Money, Common Dreams


Please support the news you can use and visit The Brooks Blackboard's website, for more news and share our posts! 

And read my brief bio about my writing life 

On social media, visit me on 

Facebook: The Brooks Blackboard 

Twitter: @_CharlesBrooks   


Monday, September 25, 2023

The Baltimore Sun’s Reckoning on Freddie Gray

 

Five days after Freddie Gray’s death, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) published on its website an interactive slideshow on his arrest, which it updated later that month as the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) added information. Audiences could click through a timeline of details of Gray’s long April 12, 2015, ride in a Baltimore police van, during which police reportedly made six stops before officers said they discovered their prisoner was unconscious. (Gray died on April 19, after a week in a coma.)

The slideshow was almost entirely sourced from the statements given by BPD leaders during press conferences, without independent corroboration. Some of the police claims were repeated as fact, with no attribution. “The driver of the transport van believes that Gray is acting irate in the back,” it stated at one point.

There was one small sign of resistance to the police narrative included in the slideshow: “Multiple witnesses tell the Sun they saw Gray beaten [at the second stop], but police say evidence including an autopsy disputes their accounts.” Here, as elsewhere in its Gray coverage, the Sun implicitly “corrected” witnesses with the police version of events.

The slideshow illustrated the Sun‘s general approach to coverage of Gray’s death, one of the biggest national stories to come out of Baltimore in decades: The narrative was largely shaped by police’s version of events, presented by the paper with limited skepticism or contradictory information. When witness accounts did appear in the Sun, they were usually reduced to brief uncorroborated soundbites.

Public strategically misled

Freddie Gray (family photo)

Freddie Gray (1989–2015)

In a new book, They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up, I reveal extensive evidence that undermines most of what the Sun reported in its slideshow timeline. My book is sourced to discovery evidence from the prosecution of six officers that was never presented in court, internal affairs investigation files and more. I reveal that police and prosecutors were aware of physical abuse that happened during the first two stops of Gray’s arrest, but strategically misled the public and manipulated evidence to hide it (as I also reported elsewhere: Appeal4/23/20; Daily Beast8/19/23).

In particular, I reveal that there were at least nine witnesses who saw police pull Gray out of the van at its second stop at Mount and Baker streets, shackle his ankles, and throw him headfirst back into a narrow compartment in the van. They also saw him becoming silent and motionless at that stop. Many of them reported these details to investigators early on. The medical examiner determined Gray’s fatal injury was caused by headfirst force into a hard surface, but she wasn’t told about these statements.

While the public saw a viral video of Gray screaming while he was loaded into the van during his arrest at the first stop, it heard much less about what happened at Mount and Baker streets. My book takes a look at the role the media played in both enabling the police’s coverup and gaslighting the witnesses.

The Sun was hardly alone in its “police say” approach to this story, but it arguably did the most damage. For one, it invested extensively in its Gray coverage, becoming the paper of record on the case, with its content republished or cited frequently by other outlets (e.g., Chicago Tribune4/25/15CNN6/24/15). And much of the Sun’s coverage took a decidedly, and increasingly, pro-police slant.

Making a mystery

Baltimore Sun: The 45-minute mystery of Freddie Gray's death

The Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) turned Freddie Gray’s death into a “mystery” by marginalizing witnesses who saw Gray physically abused by police.

Twelve days after police seized Gray, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) published “The 45-Minute Mystery of Freddie Gray’s Arrest,” exploring what was known and still unclear about his detention. The article cited three witnesses describing different types of excessive force used against Gray, alongside the police’s narrative. Over the next two years of protests, riots, trials of four officers (with no convictions) and outside investigations, the Sun continued fostering “mystery” and speculation around Gray’s cause of death (epitomized by the Rashomon-like documentary Who Killed Freddie Gray?, co-produced by the Sun and CNN2/12/16).

Yet Gray’s death was a mystery by design. Police and city leaders began insisting early on that his cause of death could never be known. “It’s clear that what happened happened inside the van,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on April 20, one day after Gray died; she asserted that Gray’s fatal injury must have happened while the van was moving, when there was nobody present to witness it.

Two days later, the Fraternal Order of Police’s attorney made a similar statement: “Our position is, something happened in that van, we just don’t know what.”

There was no evidence to support these claims—police had more evidence of excessive force at that time—but the narrative took hold. The Baltimore Sun (4/23/15) followed those statements by speculating about “rough rides,” a practice where police van drivers harm unseatbelted prisoners by driving erratically.

As city leaders invalidated the claims of witnesses, the Sun stopped highlighting their accounts in its stories, even investigative stories. A May 2015 article (5/20/15) disclosed a cellphone video that showed a few seconds of Gray silent and motionless at Mount and Baker streets, the second stop. “Less is known about what happened…when the van stopped at Baker Street and he was shackled,” the article stated.

Yet the story omitted what witnesses had previously told Sun reporters (4/24/154/24/15) about Gray being beaten and thrown headfirst into the van at that stop. The accompanying video to the May 2015 article said that officers merely “placed him back into the van” at the second stop, which was the police’s narrative.

By the time the autopsy report was leaked to the Sun (6/24/15) in June, revealing that Gray’s fatal injury was caused by headfirst impact into a hard surface—comparable to “those seen in shallow-water diving incidents”—the witness accounts of the second stop were seemingly forgotten.

While the Sun marginalized and ultimately erased witnesses, it did not hesitate to give frequent weight and credibility to the claims of police, even anonymously sourced. The Sun (4/30/15) headlined one such claim in “Gray Suffered Head Injury in Prisoner Van, Sources Familiar With Investigation Say,” with the story reporting:

Baltimore police have found that Freddie Gray suffered a serious head injury inside a prisoner transport wagon with one wound indicating that he struck a protruding bolt in the back of the vehicle, according to sources familiar with the probe.

During the trials, the medical examiner refuted the bolt claim entirely, explaining that she had told detectives on April 28 that the bolt was not consistent with any of Gray’s injuries. Two days later, the bolt story was leaked to the media.

Embedded journalism

CJR: In Baltimore, A Tale Of Two Transparencies

CJR (5/5/15) noted that even as the Baltimore Sun was granted “exclusive access” to the BPD Freddie Gray task force, “a coalition of news organizations demanding that police respond to requests for records related to the Gray case was being stonewalled.”

In 1991, former Baltimore Sun journalist and TV writer David Simon published the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which reflected the year he spent “embedded,” as he has often described it (e.g., Simon’s blog, 3/25/127/7/23), in BPD’s homicide unit. Decades later, many of the cases brought forward by the detectives Simon made famous were overturned due to withheld evidence, coerced confessions and other misconduct; a local Innocence Project leader called Homicide “a cautionary tale for embedded journalism” (New York1/12/22).

In 2015, Sun journalist Justin George used the same language, “embedded,” to describe the nine days he spent attending meetings of BPD’s Freddie Gray “task force” (e.g., Twitter10/9/15). Police set up the task force to investigate the case during the last two weeks of April 2015. While BPD promoted George’s involvement as evidence of its transparency, the department denied even basic evidence, including 911 tapes, to other news outlets (CJR5/5/15).

The Sun (5/2/15) published George’s first article on the task force, “Exclusive Look Inside the Freddie Gray Investigation,” on May 2, the day after State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges against six officers. Then it published his four-part series, “Looking for Answers” (10/9/15), in October, ahead of the first trial.

BPD picked the right news outlet to give exclusive access. George’s articles read like a love letter to BPD and an implicit challenge to any serious prosecution of the officers. He described the investigators having to hide their identities, while passing angry residents and a “Fuck the Police” sign:

They all realized the importance of their investigation and that they were part of a pivotal moment in Baltimore history…. Amid the allegations of brutality, they wanted to show that they would leave no stone unturned.

George turned up the rhetorical dial in describing Homicide Major Stanley Brandford, “a former Marine who kept his gray hair shorn close” with “a calm demeanor, quick wit and an uncanny ability to memorize facts.” Brandford, George reported, worked late through the night of his birthday, the last night of the task force’s investigation, to prepare files for the State’s Attorney’s Office:

Brandford didn’t finish copying the files until 3:30 a.m. He took the case file home, told his wife what he was about to do, and snapped some photos of the file as a keepsake. The next morning, Brandford placed the thick file in a blue tote bag and returned to police headquarters.…

It was less than a half-mile walk, but he felt the weight of history in his hands. He waited for walk signs before he crossed streets, fearful a car might hit him, scattering hundreds of important documents over the street, he said later.

In a speech the next day, Mosby described the files Brandford delivered as “information we already had.” George did not include this statement in his reporting—undercutting as it did the “weight of history” in the anecdote.

Dramatizing a locker search

Baltimore Sun image of Caesar Goodson's locker

The Baltimore Sun produced a dramatic video of the search of Officer Caesar Goodson’s locker—a search that turned up nothing notable.

The online version of George’s four-part series includes several highly produced videos following Lamar Howard, a chatty, well-dressed detective having a busy couple of days. He hands out fliers to people in the street and stops by a school to collect security footage.

The video also shows Howard participating in a raid on the locker of the van driver, Officer Caesar Goodson, on April 28. (The case files show that BPD was seeking to pin liability on Goodson from early on; Goodson is cast in a cloud of suspicion throughout George’s articles.) As papers and clothes are removed from Goodson’s locker, Howard looks toward the camera and shakes his head in dismay.

The Sun’s video editors added stirring music and artful stills and jump cuts to its videos. The camera zooms in on big bolt cutters forcing open the lock on Goodson’s locker. It then cuts dramatically to a close-up of a broken lock on the ground.

Nothing of note was ever found in Goodson’s locker. But the Sun invested its multi-media budget in doing PR for BPD.

Case files show that, by the end of the two-week task force, investigators had collected statements from a dozen witnesses describing Gray being tased, beaten, kicked, forcefully restrained and thrown headfirst into the van. None of George’s stories included any reference to these witness accounts.

George does cite Detective Howard arriving at a conclusion about Gray’s death that seemingly left the case unsolved for BPD: “‘Whatever happened,’ Howard said, ‘happened in the van.’” It was the same claim made by the mayor before the task force ever met.

Ignoring evidence 

Baltimore Sun: Baltimore officers' text messages offer glimpse at mindset after Freddie Gray arrest, and as prosecutors zeroed in

The Baltimore Sun (12/21/17) published texts messages from police officers it described as “candid, even vulnerable.”

In 2016, the Sun was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its Freddie Gray coverage. Yet as more evidence in the case emerged over the years that followed, the news outlet neglected to update the public on it. (Until 2022, when the nonprofit Baltimore Banner launched, the Sun was the only major news outlet in the city.)

In 2017, BPD finally released files from the Gray investigation to the Sun (12/20/17) and other news outlets, including nine binders of paperwork and six sets of photos. While police withheld a lot of evidence, the binders still offered a gold mine. They included a transcript of the statement of the lieutenant involved in Gray’s arrest, which was never played in court and incriminates him in a coverup story; an alternate map of the van’s route that investigators were considering while promoting their official narrative publicly; dispatch reports that undermined the police narrative of when officers called for a medic; hospital photos showing marks on Gray’s body indicating excessive force; and more.

The Sun only reported on the files in one article (12/21/17), which covers some of the officers’ text messages. Reporter Kevin Rector described the text messages as “candid, even vulnerable.” He recounted the officers denying ever harming Gray and discussing the pressures they felt from so much “anti-police sentiment.” The article did not mention that, in the same text conversations, the officers discussed that they should be careful what they texted to each other.

In 2015, George wrote that the task force investigators had left “no stone unturned.” By 2017, the Baltimore Sun didn’t change that narrative by looking closely at any of the investigators’ work.

The Sun continued to overlook new evidence in Gray’s death in 2020, when I published an article in the Appeal (4/23/20) that contained embedded audio and video files never released to the public. These included the statements witnesses gave to investigators starting from hours after the arrest, photographic and other evidence of excessive force, and evidence of the officers developing their first-day coverup story around their knowledge of what happened at the second stop.

One Baltimore Sun reporter, Justin Fenton (4/27/20), tweeted out the Appeal article, indicating that he had at least reviewed the new evidence. A few months later, Fenton co-wrote an article (7/16/20) revisiting the Freddie Gray story in light of how Gov. Larry Hogan discussed it in his new memoir. The article gave no indication of new evidence in the case, while it perpetuated old narratives of a vague mystery:

[Hogan] writes that the cause of the man’s injuries and death is “in dispute.” But he offers just two possibilities: either the injuries were the result of “a tragic, unforeseeable accident,” or officers purposely gave Gray a “rough ride.” Could it have been something else? Hogan leaves out the possibility of anything in between, such as negligence on the part of officers in handling Gray’s transport.

In keeping with the Sun’s legacy in covering the Gray case, Fenton left off the accounts of more than a dozen witnesses who saw Gray abused by police and thrown headfirst into the van, the exact kind of mechanism that the autopsy report claimed caused his “shallow-water diving accident” type of injury.

The Baltimore Sun’s seemingly stubborn refusal to share specific new evidence in Baltimore’s best-known and reported story in at least a decade is perhaps more of a mystery than how Gray was killed by police. Whatever the Sun’s reasoning, the effect has been to support police and other officials in hiding facts behind a veil of endless speculation.


Parts of this story were adapted from Justine Barron’s book They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up (Arcade, 2023).

Featured image: Detail from the cover of They Killed Freddie Gray.


Originally published on FAIR.org, September 22nd, 2023. Reprinted with permission.     

Please support and visit The Brooks Blackboard's website for more news stories, and this link for my brief bio.

On social media, visit me on 

Facebook: The Brooks Blackboard 

Twitter: @_CharlesBrooks