I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the difficulty in accessing primary source material. Why don't any of these outlets post the surveillance video and let us decide for ourselves how much of a resemblance there is.
I don't know what passage you're describing, but this one is implied to be part of a narrative that is told from the perspective of Mr. Williams, i.e. he's the one who remembers "The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams"
> The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted.
> “Is this you?” asked the detective.
> The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face.
All the preceding grafs are told in the context of "this what Mr. Williams said happened", most explicitly this one:
> “When’s the last time you went to a Shinola store?” one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williams’s recollection.
According to the ACLU complaint, the DPD and prosecutor have refused FOIA requests regarding the case:
Maybe it's just me, but "we just took his word for it" doesn't strike me as particularly good journalism if that's what happened. If they really wrote these articles without that level of basic corroboration then that's pretty bad.
It's a common technique in journalism to describe and attribute someone's recollection of events in a series of narrative paragraphs. It does not imply "we just took his word for it", though it does imply that the reporter finds his account to be credible enough to be given some prominent space.
This arrest happened 6 months ago. Who else besides the suspect and the police do you believe reporters should ask for "basic corroboration" of events that took place inside a police station? Or do you think this story shouldn't be reported on at all until the police agree to give additional info?
>They are in the business of exposing you to as many paid ads as possible.
NPR is a non-profit that is mostly funded by donations. They only have minimal paid ads on their website to pay for running costs - they could easily optimize the news pages to increase ad revenue but they don't because it would get in the way of their goals.
