The Daily Kos has the article The Official Michael Brown Autopsy Report Doesn’t Say What the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Says It Does.  In the article there is a list of discrepancies between what the newspaper said the expert said and what she actually said.  I picked one which may or may not be representative.

The article claims the expert said the autopsy didn’t support witnesses who said Michael Brown was shot while running away or with his hands up. She apparently said nothing of the sort.

The Daily Kos article mentioned interviews and reports by Lawrence O’Donnell.  Rather than read second, or third hand info, I decided to look up those broadcasts. The two segments are ‘Inaccurate and misleading’ on Brown autopsy and Paper obtains official Michael Brown autopsy.  Each one of these segments may be way more than you want to listen to.  O’Donnell certainly pinpoints the issues of incompetence by reporters and newspapers.

In one of the video segments O’Donnell interviews the expert, Dr. Judy Melinek, who was so badly misquoted by the newspapers.  She does a good job of clarifying exactly what she did say and what seh didn’t say.  At first O’Donnell seems to be scrupulously separating what you can learn from an autopsy from what you can’t by getting the expert to talk about these issues.  Unfortunately toward the end, even O’Donnell wants her to say things that she cannot say from the autopsy report she was given to review.   However, if you listen to what the doctor says in answer to his questions, she just refused to play along and give him the answers he wants that are just not concusively proven by the evidence she had at her disposal.

Even though O’Donnell seems to be orders of magnitude more careful in what he says than the newspapers were, he still falls down a little.

I think this is a perfect example of how important it is to get to original sources if you want to know what was really said.  Even this expert  who reviewed the autopsy report, and is trying to be extremely cautious in what she says, is not an original source.