St. Louis Post-Dispatch spokesperson Tracy Rouch sent BuzzFeed News a statement refuting what Crump wrote in his letter.
The open letter by Benjamin L. Crump, the lead attorney for the Michael Brown family, is a gross mischaracterization of the weeks of extensive coverage in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since the Aug. 9 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.
His letter misconstrues why the Post-Dispatch filed a legal request to determine whether Michael Brown, 18, had a juvenile criminal record. Reports by some bloggers and others on social media have contended that he had a juvenile criminal record.
Our sole motivation is to determine the facts as we continue reporting on many facets of this story.
A family court judge denied the Post-Dispatch legal petition after a hearing about whether to release any possible juvenile record, which led to a Sept. 4 story that shed new light on the issue: Michael Brown had no serious felony convictions or pending cases in juvenile court, meaning no class A or Class B felonies. That was news.
Additionally, the Sept. 4 Post-Dispatch story included this response:
Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon disputed the idea seeking any juvenile records was designed to impugn Michael Brown.
We are a news organization that pursues facts, which are the basis of coverage. Innuendo and speculation through various forms of media have raised questions about whether Michael Brown had a criminal record. We are seeking to find those facts without prejudgment or bias.
It is ironic that todays new information appears favorable to Michael Brown by stating he had no record of adult or serious juvenile crimes, yet some have characterized the pursuit of that information as damaging to Michael Brown, Bailon said.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikehayes/m...ays-media-was-going-after-clicks-with#391a38e