I read the following news article essentially comparing the burning of all those shops to a scripted media event. The thing is, the police shoot dozens (hundreds?) of unarmed people every year. The officers involved are essentially never prosecuted, and their story of events is generally the one that carries the day.
Anyways, the only reason Ferguson got any attention is that instead of quietly grieving, the residents decided to riot and smash things. People can argue all day that the things getting smashed usually belonged to innocent people, or that in this particular case, the unarmed man who was shot was shot for a good reason. (versus multiple times where the cops have shot a naked man, or a man holding a melee weapon from 50+ feet away, etc etc)
Anyways, essentially, the news media is acting like those kids in the middle school lunchroom. One kid pushes or taunts another, all the other kids call out “are you gonna take that? OOOOOOOOOh”.
The white prosecutors announcing that they’ve decided to drop the case because the evidence is weak is essentially one kid throwing a punch. (something the prosecutors rarely do when the defendant is poor no matter how bullshit the case is, as you can read for yourself from the dozens of innocent project cases. Also, grand juries don’t decide indictments, prosecutors do in actual practice because prosecutors are permitted to cherry pick the evidence.)
From the perspective of the folks protesting in Ferguson, if they didn’t do what damage they could, it would have been the same as when the kids decide not to fight in middle school and everyone walks away disappointed calling them cowards.
All of the rioters were fully aware that a peaceful ending would have resulted in the 24 hours news article forgetting them by the next day.
So yes, there is a rational reason for the burning shops in Ferguson. It isn’t senseless violence, it has happened for a simple and logical reason. It is irrelevant whether or not the grand jury made the right call.
Oh yes, the media has a share of the blame in this. Especially since we know now that the “media narrative” was almost pure bullshit. To wit: witness testimony was contradictory, and at best inconclusive. There were some people claiming the police officer shot the guy for no reason, but there were also people who said that the guy who got shot was acting like a maniac. To quote one witness: “…and damn if he didn’t charge at the cop like a linebacker!”
Another part of the problem is that there are people like Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton. Stirring up racial animosity is pretty much what they do for a living. IMO, it’s not unfair to describe them as professional racists.
Everything you described are flaws with eyewitness testimony. It seems less like an attempt to spin a “media narrative” and more of an attempt to report on absolutely every piece of information on a popular story.
If you want to compare this to middle school fighting, use the example of two kids ready to fight when the teacher breaks them up. As soon as the teacher walks away, they fight anyway. The principal sends them home, and they fight as soon as they get off school property.
The first riots in Ferguson broke out the Sunday night after Brown was killed. The national media hadn’t even caught on to the story yet.
Before the grand jury decision, protesters asked to basically police themselves, to give the grownups in the crowd a chance to calm down the agitators before the cops moved in. Of course, that lasted less than 15 minutes.
Bottom line is, there were people determined to stir up shit, and it didn’t matter whether the media showed up or not.