A few years ago, I was backstage at a panel discussion having a conversation about covering the police when an older journalist interjected.
“You’re not saying that we should automatically assume the police are lying about everything they are saying, are you?” he asked.
I would never say that. What I have said, though, is that, too often, members of the media automatically believe things that the police say, when in fact, the burden should remain on them to provide proof. Too often we assume they are telling the truth. Too rarely do we force them to provide evidence. Even when we do, we often don’t look at what they’ve provided skeptically enough.
“Oh,” he responded. “That makes sense.”
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One of the reasons people distrust the media is because too often the media they encounter is fundamentally untrustworthy. Good journalism requires redundancies. It is by design, inefficient. It takes time and patience. It’s often narratively complicated.
None of those things are easy and they are especially difficult in newsrooms that seek to move more quickly than ever while employing fewer journalists overseen by fewer, less experienced, editors than ever. None of this is a recipe for a media that can create the type of rigorous journalism that engenders trust, especially not within a society that already distrusts major institutions.
And a world in which people not only distrust, but in many cases actively despise, their media, is a world in which people will condone acts of government censorship and coercion, making such acts more likely. Our current presidential administration, among other acts of press restriction and repression, has pressured a major television network to silence its late night comedian. In response, some have in essence shrugged and remarked: “well, but the joke he told was inaccurate in a predictably partisan way.”
Central to building the world we want, a world in which the populace believes in the value of a robust free press — and thus finances and defends a robust free press — is the task of building a world in which the average American believes the press that they have is actually worth financing and defending. That, of course, requires having a press actually worth financing and defending.
Which brings us to the case of Jussie Smollett.
Most people believe they know everything they will ever need to know about the case of Jussie Smollett. The consensus proffered by the police and prosecutors, spread by a near entirety of the press and deeply-hardened into the public consciousness as “fact” is the following:
Smollett, a gay, black actor and outspoken social justice activist fabricated a hate crime, claiming to have been assaulted by a masked white man who invoked then-candidate Donald Trump’s “MAGA” movement and placed a noose around his neck. To do so, Smollett first mailed himself a fake threat. He then wrote a personal check to a Nigerian-American man who had been an extra on Smollett’s hit TV show Empire and who was sometimes his personal trainer. That man and his brother then purchased the rope and masks, went to Smollett’s apartment (using both Uber and a taxi) and then carried out the fake attack themselves. When confronted by police, the brothers confessed to colluding with Smollett, who they said had masterminded the entire plot.
That is more or less what everyone believes to be true. You are convinced of it. It would take some type of irrefutable evidence to un-convince you. But humor me, if not for this whole piece, just for the next paragraph. For two minutes, let’s imagine another narrative:
Smollett, hoping to lose weight, enlisted the help of his sometimes personal trainer Abel Osundairo and his brother, Ola, to get ahold of a steroid illegal in the U.S. but available in Nigeria. He paid for the trip with a personal check which he labeled as being payment for training. Unbeknownst to Smollett, Ola Osundairo happened to be a homophobe and convicted felon who had previously been charged with, among other things, attempted murder. Seeing an opportunity to put more of Smollett’s money in their own pockets, the brothers concocted a hair-brained plan: they paid a white man to help them attack the actor, making the assumption that if Smollett (who’d recently gotten a racist death threat) got hate-crimed, he would be easier to upsell on additional personal training, self-defense and drug procurement services. Because of the insanity of the details — noose-wielding MAGA-members in downtown Chicago targeting the star of a television show that no white person has ever watched — the Chicago police quickly deduced privately, and then announced publicly, that they believed Smollett was lying to them and proceeded to interpret everything to follow through the lens of that preconceived notion. Having concluded Smollett was the mastermind of a hoax, the police never pursued any other theory of the case. Provided an opportunity to punch left at annoying woke protesters, the press gleefully parroted the police. The Nigerians turned state's witness and got invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner. Nobody ever really listened to Smollett’s story.
I want to be clear about three things: 1. I am not saying that I believe that the second narrative is what happened 2. However, there is significant evidence to support that counter narrative, even if you haven’t ever encountered it 3. And, as of this writing, despite believing it’s unlikely we will ever know definitively what happened, I am willing to say publicly that I believe the second scenario is at least as likely as the version we’ve all accepted as fact.
Well, two more things:
4. That these are controversial things to say and that you are unlikely to believe them no matter how compellingly I craft the paragraphs to follow, speak to the dysfunction of our news-and-information ecosystem, and 5. Such dysfunction has dire consequences for our democracy.
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I am, very famously, a critic of the establishment, “traditional,” understanding of journalistic objectivity. While my critique has often been mischaracterized as a call for the concept of objectivity to be “replaced,” it’s always been a critique not of the textbook principle but of real-world practice. The journalistic ideal is fair, open inquiry in which every party is given a full hearing, in which all claims are subject to strict scrutiny, and in which the end product is written with humility and absent any unsupported implications. The problem is that the media, like all institutions, proclaims lofty standards that it comes nowhere close to meeting.
Generations have looked at our media and observed, as Ike and Tina Turner sang: “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”
We don’t live up to our aspirational values because — like politicians, policewomen, lawyers, and even you, dear reader — journalists are hopelessly biased. We are human beings, creatures who, in the main, are biologically-disinclined against imagining reality beyond the limitations of our non-objective perceptions of our own experience. In order to create anything resembling objective journalism, the reporters and editors must possess clarity about their own biases and proactively report against the narratives they are most predisposed to believe. Earned “expertise” can easily give way to narrative stereotyping — the assumption that because a certain fact pattern existed in a previous story it must also be true of the current story.
In that spirit, here are some of my relevant biases: I’ve spent many years covering American police departments. I’ve covered street crime and police budgets and mass shootings and terror attacks. One of the first major stories of my career involved providing what was, initially, the only skeptical reporting about the police shooting of a Hispanic man: locating a direct eyewitness who had been too scared to speak to police and revealing that the autopsy contradicted the officers’ story. (That family was ultimately paid $5.3 million).
I know and have interviewed virtually every leading reform and abolitionist activist, and many police officers, prosecutors and prison officials. Like most black people, I have loved ones who are police and prison guards, and I have loved ones who have been and who are incarcerated.
One more thing.
I know Jussie Smollett. Not in any real way, but in the way all black people living public lives in America sort of know each other. We’ve been in the same rooms. I have good friends who are his friends. His sister starred in a movie made by one of my friends. Smollett played my third favorite character in Empire. After his incident, it took me exactly one text message to get Jussie’s phone number from someone.
Back then, I sent Smollett a message expressing my sorrow at what he had claimed happened. When he circled back years later, looking for journalists willing to hear him out, I didn’t return the message. He was still proclaiming innocence and I had decided I was unwilling to write about him unless he was willing to admit it was all a hoax.
Having decided he was the bad guy, I self-righteously refused to hear anything else.
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Fortunately for all of us, there are better, more fair-minded journalists than me out there, including the team behind “The Truth About Jussie Smollett?” a 90-minute documentary that began streaming on Netflix in late August. The documentary, provides the full police narrative — highlighting plenty of Smollett’s questionable behavior and the evidence against him — and also provides the first major platform for the actor’s version of things to be fully heard.
Among details the film highlights: there were at least two independent witnesses who gave police stories similar to Smollett’s — specifically that they saw a white man attacker that night. That detail is key, as it is one of the major points of departure between Smollett’s story and that of the Osundairo brothers. Smollett has said, consistently, that at least one of his attackers was white. The brothers continue to insist that they — two dark skinned Nigerians — are the two men in the video.
Rebecca Bell, a tenant in the same building as Smollett, said she took her dogs out that night and saw a masked white man standing outside, with a rope hanging out from under his jacket. Anthony Moore, a security guard at the Sheraton Grand in Chicago, said he saw a masked white man run past the entrance to his hotel on the night of the attack.
Curiously, as independent journalist Chelli Stanley uncovered, Chicago Police collected surveillance footage from the Sheraton but the crucial 10 seconds that could have captured the face of the attacker was missing from the video files that the department released publicly. Despite having consistently insisted he witnessed a white attacker, Moore tells the documentarians that Chicago Police presented him a photo lineup solely of black men and forced him to pick one.
“Why would Jussie hire two Nigerian guys to do an attack that he was going to say was perpetrated by white guys, if it was going to be caught on tape?” Tina Glandian, Smollett’s attorney, asks in the film. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
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The documentary falls well short of proving that Smollett is telling the truth. But that we even expect it to be able to reveals the ways in which we’ve stacked the deck against the actor. He’s forced to prove a negative — to demonstrate that he did not fake a hate crime — when the burden of proof should be on the police to prove their contention that he did.
If you start by looking to see if Smollett’s version is possible, as opposed to starting by demanding he disprove the theory you already have of what happened, it becomes clear that most of the “evidence” against Smollett is implication and not, in fact, “evidence.” Even some of his more seemingly odd behaviors can, in fact, easily fit into another theory of the case.
For example: My own identity and experiences probably make me more inclined to look for reasons to believe Smollett. I’m also a mixed race black man, who is a public figure with connections to prominent parts of the racial justice movement. And also, because I am a very professionally successful man-child, I’ve done silly things like not eat during a travel day and, because I do not keep food in my house because I do not know how to cook, then went outside in weather so ridiculous that no delivery is available in order to procure a deeply unsatisfying late night meal. The idea that I would find myself venturing out into a polar vortex for a 1 a.m. sandwich is remarkably realistic.
Similarly, much continues to be made of Smollett grabbing his Subway sandwich after the alleged hate crime occurred.
Let me ask you something: Have you ever been jumped? I have. What did I do afterward? I immediately collected my various belongings.
People who’ve been violently assaulted don’t abandon their things in the snow. People so hungry that they’ll brave subzero temperatures to get a Chicken-Bacon-Ranch footlong don’t leave their food behind.
But once again, once we’ve decided that Smollett is lying, our brains begin looking for evidence to support that theory, fitting whatever new facts we encountered into slots that reaffirm our belief that he must be misleading us.
Yes, Smollett still had the noose around his neck when police arrived half an hour after the attack (He says he put it back on to show the arriving officers where it had been) and yes he didn’t want to give his cell phone to the police (Would you?). Once again, while these actions may strike you as weird, they are factually inconclusive and do not actually contradict Smollett’s story.
The strongest real, tangible evidence in favor of the police narrative is the combined video and records that show the two masked men involved in the attack Smollett fled back to the neighborhood of Ola Osundario’s apartment and called their car using his Uber account. But none of that proves that both masked men were the Osundairo brothers (the video does not show their faces). In fact, it doesn’t prove that either of the men was one of the brothers, who easily could have hired someone to carry out the attack and called them an Uber to and from the apartment where they met up to debrief.
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As a means of making public amends, let me say that I should have been willing to provide Smollett the courtesy of listening to his story long before now. He was right that all of this is, at the least, more complicated than we’ve believed. The documentary, while far from providing definitive proof that Smollett is right — the filmmakers deliberately structure the film without drawing a conclusion — raises some important points that require further clarification.
Fortunately, there’s a way to sort this all out. We could get to the bottom of a lot of this with answers to the following questions.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson declared, publicly and definitively, that Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career.”
Johnson continued: “Smollett attempted to gain attention by sending a false letter that relied on racial, homophobic and political language. When that didn’t work, concocted a story about being attacked.”
What is the evidence for this sweeping, definitive declaration that Smollett faked the threat letter? Is it just the claims of the Osundairo brothers? What investigation did Chicago Police conduct into the letter itself, who sent it, and what role or connection it may have had to the later incident? This is a very basic factual claim, fundamental to the Chicago PD’s version of what happened. Where is the evidence to support it?
Smollett claims he paid the Osundairo brothers to travel to Nigeria to purchase a drug for him. Police arrested the brothers as they arrived back in the United States after the trip. Did the brothers have the drug with them when they arrived back in America? How did they spend their time in Nigeria? What if anything did police find when they searched the brothers’ luggage. They searched the luggage, right? And investigated the Nigeria trip?
The Chicago Police Department and the Osundairo brothers, and their attorney are insistent that there was no deal cut to secure the brothers’ cooperation in prosecuting Smollett. If that is the case: what if any investigation did the Chicago PD or other law enforcement conduct into the trove of illegal firearms they recovered from Ola Osundairo’s home? Why did he not face charges?
What investigatory steps did the Chicago PD take to confirm the story that the Osundairo brothers told them and rule out Smollett’s version of events? Did they subpoena phone records? Did they look into whether or not either brother had communicated with anyone else about the incident either before or after? Did they look at the brothers’ bank statements, Paypal records or Venmo transactions to see if they paid anyone else in the period around the attack? Does either brother have known associates who match the description that Smollett provided to police of his white male attacker?
What happened to the missing video clip that, if the hotel security guard is correct, should show a white attacker fleeing the scene? Can Chicago PD track down and release the unedited clip, without the crucial gap?
That’s it. Five questions. There are more that could be asked. But the answers to just these would go a long way to either definitively disproving Smollett’s story that the police railroaded him or to documenting that there may, in fact, be a there, there to his version of events.
This case cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars, and resulted in a man who claimed to be the victim of a hate crime being nationally and internationally ridiculed. It should be worth it to all of us to ascertain the truth.
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While I tried to be transparent about my assumptions, and biases, it is unquestionably true that I decided on the broad outlines of my perspective and then began looking for evidence to assemble to support it. It is fully possible that resulted in inadvertent cherry-picking or the overlooking of important counter evidence on my part. Based on my years of expertise — my lived experience both as a black person and a professional critical thinker about police investigations and media coverage — I cited and linked to academic studies to support my analysis. Someone starting from the opposite conclusion, that the possibilities raised in the documentary and advanced here are not what happened, could marshal a similar set of studies to support their rebuttal.
Listing all of my credentials or a bunch of reasons why I want you to believe you should trust what I’ve written does not, in fact, mean that any conclusion I’ve drawn will end up being the accurate one.
I’m not immune to narrative stereotyping. Unlike many of you, I came into this piece aware of the reality that there are countless documented cases in which the police manipulate, destroy and plant evidence in order to put their foot on the scale in support of the conviction of someone they have prejudged as guilty. But just because it is a pattern, just because it has been true many, many times prior, that does not mean it is true in this case. My job is to report against those biases, but there is no guarantee, no matter how I believe that I have tried, that the final product will overcome them and amount to something approaching the highest of standards. There is no ensuring I have not excluded some piece or pieces of relevant information that is vital to weighing the narrative that has been presented here or my credibility as a teller of this story.
It is fully possible that the image I’ve painted in this piece ultimately will not, if we ever get the full facts, correspond with objective reality. This is a piece of media criticism. It is not an investigation. I wrote most of it in one sitting, immediately after watching the documentary.
And also: readers impressions of this piece will have nothing to do with whether or not what I am arguing is objectively correct. It will much more be based on their biases, stereotypes and the general vibes they perceive it to give off. Some who agree with it will do so because they were pre-inclined to: because they trust me or my work, or distrust the police, or think Smollett is cute, or any number of other reasons. Many of the people who will later say they read this piece and disagree with its conclusion will have not actually read it. They already decided Smollett is a shifty liar. Or that I am. Untrustworthy mulattos, the both of us.
Some, including those who agree, will confidently misstate the things I’ve written. Some will voice counterarguments directly pre-rebutted, because even if they read they did not comprehend. As humans we are very bad at processing information that challenges the things we already believe. This essay is particularly detail-oriented and, admittedly, tedious. There are long paragraphs and complex clauses and lots of commas. Telling messy complicated stories that endeavor to be fair and empathetic to everyone involved are remarkably hard to pull off within a clean, cogent narrative structure. It takes years of very specific devotion to a very specific subsection of our craft. I’ve been doing it for years and am far from a master.
Most practitioners would object to the suggestion that the average news piece, or even in-depth investigation could ever reflect this level of nuance. But why should anyone trust us if we cover complex cases while refusing to articulate their complications? To have the media we need for a functioning multicultural society we have to be willing to write long pieces, about complicated things, that require being read all the way through to the end in order to fully comprehend.
Although, judging by the early press response to the documentary, it seems unlikely Smollett’s case will get the type of rigorous hearing it deserves. A Guardian reviewer dismissed any new review of the case out of hand, describing the documentary as “icky, irresponsible television.” A more-substantive review of the case in Slate, still opens with a clear bias against Smollett: “The documentary retells the erratic epic from two perspectives: that of those who maintain, like the Chicago courts decided, that Smollett definitely lied about being attacked by white men in the streets of Chicago, and those who have found so-called evidence that may prove the contrary.”
Hold up. Courts do not “decide” whether or not someone “definitively lied.” They decide what the available evidence, as presented in court, suggests is most likely to have happened. This is, definitionally, a subjective process that very often gets things wrong.
To be clear, I’m not saying that more investigation won’t prove that the police and prosecutors got this right. I am saying that, years and years into this saga, the fact that such basic questions remain, on a case that received sustained, international press coverage, is evidence of massive media failure.
I’m not saying Jussie Smollett is telling the truth. What I am saying is that someone more objective than me should get to the bottom of it.
This is all mind-numbingly familiar. At Black Virginia News we are investigating what happened to LG Justin Fairfax in 2019. What are we finding? We're learning that The Washington Post's Mike Semel, Cameron Barr, Theresa Vargas and Karen Tumulty were so ensconced in the "believe all women" narrative that no one bothered to check any other possible side of the story. Have you ever seen a Black man beg for police investigation over and over and not get it? That was LG Justin Fairfax. There was good reason for his effort to be investigated as legacy media published without facts or investigation. When Ben Bradlee said the "truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run" he wasn't joking.
Today's legacy media is driven by the pressure of random unverified comments on social media, unproven salacious allegations that get big traffic and the rush to publish. The rush to print is the big killer. Speed to publish is now more important than publishing accurate information. Jussie Smollett is a celeb so that was definitely a tale media would rush into publication. Once the narrative train pulls out of the station it's game over. Nothing can change the initial narrative. No one wants to ever admit they were wrong. Preconceived notions and personal feelings dominate the direction of coverage. No one at WaPo or the NYT bothered to look at all the court records, medical records, phone records, lengthy and suspicious history of multiple unproven allegations by accusers, court audio, glaringly obvious political connections insanely suspicious timing -- and complete lack of evidence against LG Fairfax. People believe whatever they read. They believe whatever they're told.
No one at NYT bothered to interview his accusers on the allegations. No one at the NYT bothered to call Fairfax before publishing a life destroying allegation with no evidence attached to it. No one at WaPo bothered to interview an accuser with a 20 year old allegation with zero evidence and a duplicate 21 year old allegation having nothing to do with Fairfax with zero evidence. Hard provable facts related to locations and dates and no corroboration or evidence over two decades stopped nothing from being published. The lack of investigation at the NYT was likely caused by the politics around the issue -- basic journalistic procedure was inconvenient. The paper didn't want to be seen as "questioning" women. A press release from an attorney with no actual proof of anything was taken as gospel. Destroying someone's life and reputation meant nothing. When a news org decides what the narrative is and is too embarrassed to admit later it may be wrong after other hard evidence is uncovered it's a tragedy -- and it kills public trust. The public learns the truth in other ways by other sources. The job of journalism must be to learn the truth and report it. Not toss unverified stories into publication and "see what happens."
The fact is: When mistakes are made no one cares. There is no punishment for failure in journalism. There are no set rules as in other professions. Each platform makes up their own rules. Everyone in senior leadership understands that Times-Sullivan means no elected official can win a defamation case. The NYT hasn't lost a defamation case against an elected official since the 1964 SCOTUS decision. Everyone says "it was widely reported..." and walks away. WaPo and NYT suppressed the hard evidence that would exonerate Justin Fairfax. Publishing fast is everything and the algorithm demands it. It is an open secret that the fastest easiest way to destroy someone's reputation is a SA related allegation. Nothing can be proven. No facts can be confirmed. In politics these tactics are standard. The goal is to destroy someone in the court of public opinion and get it in NYT and WaPo and bounce. The punishment on the accused is instant.
No one in journalism bothered to notice that no hard facts were on the table in the case of Justin Fairfax. What a surprise. Didn't Ida Wells tell us all of this in the late 1800s? For Black men -- the concern for reputation is non-exist. Compare what happened to Fairfax with what happened to Joe Biden in 2020 (the Tara Reade allegation). The media acted as Biden's defense attorney and investigative arm. The racial differences in these stories are undeniable. Black men are clearly the most stereotyped group in legacy newsrooms -- and they often have no defender in editorial discussions because there are no Black men at the table at most legacy newsrooms. Who sets narrative and decides the focus of a story is the entire ballgame.
Jessie Smollett was done the minute the police set the narrative and the media repeated it without challenge. But that's an actor. When journalistic news orgs make mistakes that change the course of history and don't even bother to correct the record one has to wonder: Are we better off without them? The damage a news org causes reporting the wrong information to the public is disorientating. These mistakes are misinformation. Are we better off with independent media that takes the time to do the hard work of investigation on matters legacy media doesn't want to confront?
As the son of a very famous Black male celebrity, I have a 6th sense when it comes to things like this, because I have been on the end Jussie was on. I have met several very famous Black men who had stories made up about them and they all started from the premise they must've been guilty before the trial ever began. They were all family friends. When it comes to Black people, especially rich ones, I do NOT trust the media. I admire very few journalists, whether they're corporate or independent. I know how the gossip mills work around this country, because our family fell victim to it often enough. I do NOT trust the poleece (misspelled on purpose). I am a product of the 60's and haven't seen the kind of honest journalism I saw during that time ... since about the 1980's. Look at how they scared the shit out of people about AIDS and HIV.
Just for the record, I felt in my gut that Jussie was telling the truth. I stayed out of arguments about that entire thing, because I knew people would rather believe sensationalized lies and would attack me. Who needed that bullshit? I've seen that all of my life. Nothing about that entire cop story made any sense, and I swear people are more motivated by jealousy & spite than they are by common sense. Especially of rich Black men/women, let alone a rich gay Black man. Why would a man at the height of his career do such a thing? He doesn't strike me as a person who is deranged, disillusioned, or mentally ill. He just doesn't.
I'm not gay, so I never saw him as cute, but I did think he was very talented in his role on Empire. The entire thing brought up my own personal childhood trauma with vicious people who thought like you, Wesley. I saw the documentary last week, and unlike you, I think it more than proved the dishonesty of the Chicago police department. I've seen other articles about why the CPD would do such a thing, and given the scandal going on around that poleece chief, I more than ever believe they made up that entire scenario to smear Mr. Smollett. There's no inconclusiveness going on in my mind.
Anyway, that's my perspective and as people do, take it or leave it. I do not care. 😆