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St. Louis Post-Dispatch

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who tweeted corroboration of Darren Wilson's account suddenly 'on leave'?



This is weird. A pretty big buzz started last night when St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Christine Byers tweeted that there is plenty of support for Officer Darren Wilson's account of the Michael Brown shooting:

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That tweet is still active on Byers's Twitter feed. But less than an hour ago (posting this at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time), this new tweet appeared on Byers's feed: What's going on here? Byers references sources who back up Wilson's account, only to be told her tweet didn't meet the standards of the newspaper she works for, and as a result, she is off under the Family and Medical Leave Act? How does FMLA enter into this? Or did this tweet early this morning have something to do with it? We don't have any further explanation yet, so we don't know which tweet met with her editors' disapproval. Since the one last night about the witness corroboration, we got another update via Gateway Pundit, which reports that Officer Wilson had plenty of reason to fear for his safety in the confrontation he found himself in with Brown:
The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store. Local St. Louis sources said Wilson suffered an "orbital blowout fracture to the eye socket." This comes from a source within the Prosecuting Attorney's office and confirmed by the St. Louis County Police.
All I know is this: Newspapers encourage their reporters to tweet, and a lot of what they tweet is baseless speculation. (As is much of what they write in the papers.) It's not hard to imagine that someone in a position to intimidate the Post-Dispatch didn't like Byers offering a tweet that suggested Officer Wilson may not have done anything wrong, and that the paper's editors reacted against Byers in knee-jerk fashion out of fear. This bears watching.


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