Right you are. Rivera actually wrote a balanced piece here. From the article:
"But efforts by activists to portray the unarmed teen as a choirboy maliciously murdered by a racist cop are misguided, unhelpful and untrue."
I have to say that I am stunned he was actually honest enough to say that much.
But then there's this line: "The video shows the convenience store incident starting as a minor shoplifting of a box of cigars apparently by Michael Brown. When the diminutive store clerk confronts the big kid, Brown appears to whack him up the side of his face."
That makes the charge go from "minor shoplifting" to "robbery" and "assault", doesn't it?
Frankly I was stunned by that video. Either the clerk is tiny, or Brown was a huge, very powerful thug.
He pushes the clerk around like a rag doll.
I can totally buy the cops story now.
Even a big cop would have trouble trying to wrestle with a gorilla like that.
He's a lawyer by training, and actually worked briefly for the New York City police department early in his career as an internal investigator. If you go back through his career, I'll bet you'd find that his reporting on stories like this involving police matters is typically thorough and objective.