Cop Relates Jim Hoft's Scoop to Fox News: Wilson Was Badly Beaten Before Shooting

Score one for Jim Hoft, it sure is looking like.

Now, it could still be that these cops are misinformed.

(If you wanted to know how that's possible: easy, the notation of an old, healed orbital fracture of the eye in x-rays gets garbled and mis-propagated as a fresh one; I'm not saying this happened, but it could be something like that.)

However, even if the cops are misinformed, Jim Hoft's reportage of their statements is now undoubtedly 100% accurate, and this constitutes a major scoop for him.

From Fox:

Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Mo., police officer whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown touched off more than a week of demonstrations, suffered severe facial injuries, including an orbital (eye socket) fracture, and was nearly beaten unconscious by Brown moments before firing his gun, a source close to the department's top brass told FoxNews.com.

You might wonder why I'm still expressing skepticism about this. Well, it's simple: Because I don't want to credit stuff that's being put out unofficially. If it's official and documented, then my skepticism goes away completely.

I just don't want to credit something just being whispered in the ear of the occasional reporter as 100% solid-gold truth. Truth should be something you stand openly behind.*

But certainly my skepticism is receding.

And congrats to Jim Hoft -- of all the various media dopes down in Ferguson,** apparently Jim Hoft was the only one who thought, "Hey, maybe I should interview some cops to see what actually happened at the shooting."

* Commenters tell me that it's standard practice to not comment officially during an investigation.

Okay, I believe you, but there has been a fair amount of chatter from the police (officially) on important facts here.

If Wilson is in the hospital with a broken eye orbital, that's a fact. The cops can say "we're still investigating how he received these injuries," but the injuries, if they exist, are simply facts.

I don't see why these facts should be so thoroughly suppressed while the cops freely offer things like "Darren Wilson was not investigating the robbery at the initial contact with the suspects."

** Oh I don't mean to say he's dope, but I see that the way I wrote the sentence implies that.

I don't see how to fix it, though.

I mean to say that the other ones are dopes, and that he's not.

And What If Tea Partiers Threw Rocks at Chris Hayes? Larry O'Connor notes MSNBC's chill attitude towards "protesters" throwing rocks at them, and wonders (without wondering much) whether they'd have been so understanding if Tea Partier protesters had thrown the stones.

Not X-Rays: A commenter tells me that a fractured orbital would typically be imaged by a CT scanner, not an X-ray machine.

posted by Ace at 04:58 PM

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