Up till now, the most accurate reporting the mainstream media have done on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case has been relaying that Martin had Skittles and iced tea on him when he was shot. At the rate they’re going, I won’t be surprised if it emerges that he was carrying Pop Rocks and Four Loko.
Here is a partial list of the wild, reckless, irresponsible claims the left-leaning media have made in the Martin-Zimmerman case:
Zimmerman is a white racist who killed Martin because he was black.
Multiple acquaintances of Zimmerman’s, including black friends, testified that Zimmerman—who is half-Hispanic—isn’t racist. Zimmerman comes from a multiracial family and was tutoring a black neighbor’s two children and helping raise money for her black church.
Zimmerman racially profiled Martin and told a 911 dispatcher Martin looked suspicious because he was black. Zimmerman also uttered a racial slur.
In an act of journalistic malpractice, an NBC producer chopped up the 911 audiotape to make it seem as though Zimmerman had found Martin suspicious because he was black, when Zimmerman was merely responding to the dispatcher’s request to identify Martin’s race. Forensic experts enhanced the sound quality of the tape to isolate Zimmerman’s voice and concluded, not that he had used the archaic term “coon,” but that he was lamenting the cold.
Zimmerman was a trigger-happy vigilante who shot Martin because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground law.”As Walter Olson and others have explained, “Stand Your Ground” law is irrelevant in the Zimmerman case. If Zimmerman stalked Martin and shot him in cold blood, then he didn’t act in self-defense. If Martin knocked Zimmerman to the ground and started pummeling him, then Zimmerman couldn’t have safely retreated, which is what “Stand Your Ground” opponents would require potential victims to do. Either way, “Stand Your Ground” has no bearing on Zimmerman’s actions.
Martin was a sweet, innocent kid who wouldn’t have started a fight with Zimmerman.
The night he was shot, Martin was serving a suspension for carrying a plastic baggie with traces of marijuana. Previously, he had been suspended for tardiness, truancy and spray painting graffiti. Martin had been reprimanded for possessing stolen jewelry. His Twitter account revealed an affinity for gangsta culture and the suggestion he had assaulted a bus driver. Photos of Martin displayed a menacing figure grimacing at the camera with a grill over his lower teeth.
Zimmerman lied about Martin bashing his head into the concrete.
Police confirmed Zimmerman’s injuries and grass stains on his clothes. When ABC News released a grainy surveillance video that didn’t show obvious wounds on Zimmerman’s head, the media called him a liar. When ABC later released an enhanced video showing evidence of two gashes on the back of Zimmerman’s head, liberals claimed the evidence was inconclusive. Last week ABC released a graphic photograph taken just after the incident showing thick rivulets of blood streaming down the back of Zimmerman’s head. Liberals have been silent while trying to figure out how to squirm out of the latest corner they’ve painted themselves into.
Confronted with evidence disproving their claims of discrimination, race-baiting liberals always shift the standard of proof to make their case just one step harder to discredit. When the current standard is refuted, they cry, “Yes, but…” and move on to the next standard, claiming that all previous standards are irrelevant. The logical endpoint of this burning-platform approach to argumentation is for the Left to claim that, okay, the facts don’t support their case this time around, but the problem they are decrying is nonetheless an outrage.
If the sheer volume of circumstantial evidence exonerating Zimmerman accumulates to such a degree that a majority of the population accepts his side of the story, the Left won’t admit they were wrong. They won’t take responsibility for the retaliatory beatings across the country incited by their race-baiting. Just as they did with false rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse players, the flurry of phony noose-hanging incidents on college campuses, and the apocryphal rash of black church burnings, liberals will claim that the charges against Zimmerman were fake but accurate, because they drew national attention to a problem that in fact exists only in their heads.
